By Joyce Sampson
Maritza Rivera is best known around the D.C. metro area as a thoughtful storyteller, spoken word artist and a tireless advocate for Latino writers of African descent. Born in New York and raised in Puerto Rico in a Spanish-speaking household, she moved to Maryland, courtesy of the U.S. Army, where she served as a soldier. Rockville has been her home since 1994.
Now 70, Rivera is living her dream. Writing has been her passion since childhood, but it was only after she settled in Montgomery County and haunted the local arts scene that she had a chance to perform at a poetry jam for the first time. Seduced by the applause, Rivera was hooked.
Since then, she has received accolades from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County to an International Writing Fellowship in Brazil. Last year, she co-edited the “Diaspora Café: DC AfroLatinX Poetry Anthology” and translated a poetry collection by Alberto Roblest from Spanish into English.
That she doesn’t look Puerto Rican is a common refrain, she muses. “What does a Puerto Rican look like?”
The Afro-Latino community hails from the Caribbean, Central and South America to Mexico, she says, which accounts for the group’s diversity.
Rivera created the Mariposa Poetry Reading Series (1999-2002) to nurture local writers with whom she shares a common bond. The Mariposa Poetry Retreat is back in business after the Covid-19 pandemic shut everything down.
Some say that her reach goes beyond a single demographic.
“Mariposa welcomed every stripe of person, although the original emphasis was on Latins and African Americans initially. She made a home for all poetry lovers. Her gatherings were a mix of every nationality and race,” says Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s 10th poet laureate and producer of “The Poet and the Poem,” a podcast on public radio.
“Maritza has been a major force in giving a platform for all poets and widening the opportunities for more writers to be heard and seen.”
