Educator Wrote Poems While Battling Cancer
The posthumous launch of Florinda Ruiz’s book of poems and photographs titled “Healing Dust. Poems of Survival” will take place Tuesday, Sept. 9, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at Downtown Books in Lexington.
Ruiz was an educator, scholar, translator, poet and visual artist. During her three-year-long fierce battle with cancer, she wrote heart-wrenching poetry as a strategy of survival and resistance to this cruel illness.
She was retired associate professor of foreign languages at Roanoke College. She subsequently served as visiting associate professor and director of the Writing Program at Washington and Lee University until her illness forced her to retire. Her photographic work is displayed in Paine Hall and the Center for Global Learning at Washington and Lee University.
An award-winning photographer, Ruiz matched most of the poems in the collection with photographs she had taken all over the world. Florinda’s book of poems and photographs will be available for purchase and there will be brief readings of her poetry to celebrate her life and art.
In the endorsement to her book, Domnica Radulescu, professor of Comparative Literature at Washington and Lee, said the following about it: ‘“Healing Dust’ is a work of poetic alchemy: transforming the anguish and grief of terminal illness into incandescent images and words.”
