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Lucina Kathmann (born April 28, 1942 in Albany, New York) is a writer and activist from the USA. Her multilingual books, essays, and short stories have been published internationally. She has been an active member of PEN International, a worldwide association of writers fighting for freedom of expression, since 1986 and has represented the association at the United Nation’s annual Commission on the Status of Women since 1996.

Activism

Lucina’s central life work has been her involvement with PEN International, beginning in 1986. She has written and spoken extensively about women’s rights and women’s problems globally, especially about repression and murder of female writers across the world. She promotes Mexican literature in speaking engagements around the world and calls international attention to turmoil and threats to Mexican writers and journalists. She also wrote about the largely uninvestigated disappearances and femicides in Ciudad Juarez. Much of her writing advocates for global peace. Furthermore, she heads the Human Rights Commission of the Women Writers Committee. She now acts as International Vice president Emerita of PEN International and has filled various leadership positions in her local chapter, the PEN Centre in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.

She was part of a team of PEN members who worked for the release of imprisoned Turkish playwright Esber Yagmurdereli and was heavily involved in the campaigns in support of Nawal El Saadawi, Pussy Riot and Stella Nyanzi.

In her work with PEN, she has traveled globally, even to some intensely embattled areas of the world. Lucina has supported the literature, culture and language of Kurdistan in many aspects. In April 2014, hers was one of the first signatures on the “Appeal: Support a Democratic Experiment” from Medico International and the Kurdish Center for Public Relations (Civaka Azad) calling for global humanitarian relief aid to the Rojava region in Syria. She tries to inform people about the situation of the Kurds, in the hopes of bringing awareness and providing aid.

Lucina has held a leading position on the board of the PEN International Women Writers Committee since 1988, though the Committee was not formally created until 1992. It is devoted to advocating for women writers and forming coalitions with other women’s groups to amplify their voice and advocacy. Since 1996, she has represented the committee at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, usually joining the Latin American and Caribbean caucus, which focuses primarily on issues of education and violence.

Besides her work with PEN International, Lucina has collaborated with the Chicago Network for Justice and Peace (CJNP) since the late 1980s, coordinating its efforts with those of PEN International and San Miguel PEN Mexico Center on issues relating to literacy, freedom to write, and freedom of expression. As a Chicago Network board member, she has been a math tutor for students at Tubman Elementary School in Chicago, preparing them to enter elite high schools for high achievers. Her involvement at Tubman moved the CJNP to support several of the school’s projects and programs.

Early Life, Education

Lucina earned her BA in philosophy from Harvard University in 1964 and an MA from Northwestern University in 1967. She taught philosophy at Barat College in Lake Forest, IL, for a few years. This finally gave her the funds to study dance (a childhood dream), and she subsequently founded two dance companies in Chicago. In 1978, she met dance teacher Mascha Beyo, from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Fine Arts; INBA) in San Miguel de Allende, and was persuaded to move to Mexico. Lucina and her husband Charles Kuschinski met at a writing workshop there and continued to develop their writing careers. They also produced two children – Nicolás (born 1985) and Daniel (born 1988). Then in 1988, a close friend and neighbor of Lucina’s passed away during childbirth. Lucina and Charles adopted that friend’s six children and raised them alongside their own.

Career

Some of Lucina’s earliest writings were short plays. A Tape Recorder for the Maestra was presented at the Organic Theater, Chicago, in 1980. All the Villages are on Fire, a program about the role of women in the liberation struggles in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, was written in 1984 and presented at Loyola University, DePaul University and in other locations in Chicago. The Silencing of Women draws attention to women writers who have been suppressed. It was performed at INBA San Miguel, in February of 1993, at Loyola University, Chicago, in October of 1993, and also at the International PEN Congress in Guadalajara in 1996. In 1989, her novel, The Adventures of the Magnificent Kong and Brawny Mouse was published and later came out on special tapes for the blind.

In 1991, Lucina and Charles enrolled in a literary workshop conducted by Daniel Sada, a highly regarded and influential journalist, poet and writer, at the INBA in San Miguel de Allende. She proceeded to write several original pieces in English and Spanish. Throughout the early nineties, Lucina published essays, poetry, translations and children’s stories in a variety of magazines, anthologies, and other venues. After Charles’s death in 1996, she curated and edited Payshapes and the Bear, a bilingual anthology of children’s stories written by both of them. It was eventually published in 1999. The 2000s were a very prolific decade as most of Lucina’s longer works were published during this time: To Make Ourselves Heard, a bilingual (English-Spanish) anthology of essays, newspaper articles, scholarly papers and speeches came out in 2002. A second volume followed in 2004. In 2008, she published A Forest of Mathematics, a cross between a storybook and a math textbook that teaches concepts such as negative numbers, exponents, fractions, decimals and percentages, drawing on the characters and settings of Payshapes and the Bear. She has completed many translations, both literary and on the spot, especially for conferences, some organized by herself.

Lucina was part of an effort to bring the reading public of San Miguel de Allende bilingual cultural news in the newspaper El Independiente of which she became the Spanish language editor. The newspaper’s first issue was dated September 16-29, 1996 and the last issue was published on November 30, 2001. Sareda Milosz, former daughter-in-law of Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz , was the major editor of this publication. Milosz suffered from melanoma during the later years of the newspaper’s run. Her illness and eventual death brought an end to their joint project.

Honors and Awards

Lucina’s bilingual collection of children’s adventure stories, Payshapes and the Bear, was recognized as a finalist in the International Book Awards, sponsored by USA Book News. Her book of mathematics in the form of short stories, A Forest of Mathematics, was featured in the “What’s New?” section of the Feria Internacional del Libro, Guadalajara 2011.