She was born and raised in a district of old Havana to working-class parents, Angélica Hernández Domínguez and Felipe Morejón Noyola. Her father is of African heritage and her mother of African extraction. Nancy Morejón graduated with honours at the University of Havana, having studied Caribbean and French Literature, and she is fluent in French and English. She later taught French. She is a well-regarded translator of French and English into Spanish, particularly Caribbean writers, including Edouard Glissant, Jacques Roumain and Aimé Césaire, René Depestre. Her own poetry has been translated into English, German, French, Portuguese, Galician, Russian, Macedonian, and others. She is as of 2013 director of Revista Union, journal of Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba ; in 2008 she was elected president of the writer's section of UNEAC. She has produced a number of journalistic, critical, and dramatic works. One of the most notable is her book-length treatments of poet Nicolás Guillén. In 1982 she was awarded the Cuban "Premio de la crítica" for Piedra Pulida, and in 2001 won Cuba's National Prize for Literature, awarded for the first time to a black woman. This national prize for literature was created in 1983; Nicolás Guillén was the first to receive it. She also won the Golden Wreath of the Struga poetry evenings for 2006. She has toured extensively in the United States and in other countries; her work has been translated into more than ten languages, including English, Swedish and German. She has lectured at universities throughout the country and has taught at Wellesley College and the University of Missouri, which, in 1995, conducted a two-day symposium on her work and published the papers in a special issue of the Afro-Hispanic Review. Howard University Press at Washington D.C. published in 1999 a collection of critical essays on her work: Singular Like A Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon, compiled and prefaced by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Ph.D. An collection of her poems entitled Richard trajo su flauta y otros argumentos, edited by Mario Benedetti, Visor Books, was published in Madrid during the Spring of 2005.
Themes of work
Her work explores a range of themes: the mythology of the Cuban nation, the relation of the blacks of Cuba within that nation. She often expresses an integrationist stance, in which Spanish and African cultures fuse to make a new, Cuban identity. Much of her work—and the fact that she has been successful within the Cuban regime—locates her as a supporter of Cuban nationalism and the Cuban Revolution. In addition, she also voices the situation of women within her society, expressing concern for women's experience and for racial equality within the Cuban revolution; often black women are protagonists in her poems, most notably in the widely anthologized Mujer Negra. Her work also treats the grievous fact of slavery as an ancestral experience. Her work treats political themes as well as intimate, familial topics. Critics have noted her playful observations about her own people, her effective use of particularly Cuban forms of humor, and her regular "indulgence" in highly lyrical, intimate, spiritual, or erotic poetry.
