At 102, Natália Correia remains more than a memory — she is a living force of humanism, freedom, and imagination. Her words, fierce and luminous, still challenge silence, celebrate beauty, and defend liberty. From Lisbon to the Atlantic islands, from Portugal to the diaspora, her poetry and her voice echo across generations. The Cátedra Natália Correia at Fresno State carries her unfinished future forward — through literature, research, and community — ensuring that her legacy continues to inspire courage, justice, and creativity in a world that still needs her fire.

Natália Correia – also known as Natália de Oliveira Correia – was born in the parish of Fajã de Baixo in Ponta Delgada on September 13, 1923. The first eleven years of her life were lived in São Miguel, a time of which she kept precious memories that would later spark an endogenous and daughterly relationship, with her native island, and that would permit her to create a sub-textual universe of indispensible analysis in her works; the mysteries and secrets of the volcanic island surrounded by an immense ocean, an education focused on her mother, the teacher and writer Maria José de Oliveira – given that her father emigrated to Brazil in 1939 −, the fraternal and symbolic universe of the festivities of the Holy Spirit, the bench of Antero de Quental, at 5 de Outubro Square, where she would sit and dream with poetry or words beyond thought, and where she would come to write.

Her departure for Lisbon in 1934, where she lived out the rest of her life, brought her closer to the Azores, especially after her mother’s death, in 1956, which brought back her homesickness that would crystalize in her literary texts, necessarily laden with poetry: (…) Because losing a mother is having an island at your disposal, a bouquet of fiery hydrangeas, on every side facing the unspeakable, and to have an island is to possess an object turned immaculate by distance, the cream of a child infinitely called by the waves emptying itself through the singing mouth with which we haunt the adult commas of the places in which we dwell (…). In 1946, a year after the publication of the children’s novel Grandes Aventuras de um Pequeno Herói (The Great Adventures of a Small Hero), Natália Correia would begin a 52-year literary life, marked by undeniable ties to the island, which would carry her to her Native Land.

Most of the literary works by Natália Correia, be they poetry, dramatic texts, novels, short stories, diaries, chronicles, and essays, were written during the dictatorship of the New State and during the leadership of Marcelo Caetano. Although many of her books were seized by the censors, and she was judged in court, she resisted fascism, practicing freedom in the otherness of literary texts and in her public defense of democracy. Literature came to her as a free and liberating ground, imposing the necessities of a reconciliatory synthesis, which was often found to be unattainable in the context of historical antinomies. And it was there, in the act of creation, that she freed the human being from all forms of oppression and repression, indicating the armistice of love as a fundamental route towards the fall of all antitheses. A devourer of knowledge, with a thirst for wisdom, she read and reread her time, which was one dominated by hate, war, greed, and corruption; and to which the natural boundaries of the historical process were joined. Natália wrote that the act of creation permitted the unravelling of human totality, and that by questioning the world, one could discover the interventional and transformational function of literature.

Absolutely free of dogma and canon, she studied diverse literary genres and philosophies to create a personal voice that was inevitably romantic, with all that Romanticism encompasses, before and after her time. And in that individual voice, she inscribed her manifesto or the apology of the human being as the beginning and end of the act of creation. For this, she read and studied cultures and civilizations, religions and other beliefs, linguistic systems, always showing a universal and eclectic worldview that would lead her to defend a Euro-Ibero-Afro-Asian civilization where the homeland, the language, religion, ethnicity, and political ideals would all be called human beings: (…) I’m not suited for revolutions. These surely have the power to collapse structures and remake them with the same cement, driven by the gluttony of power. Because in what remains to be done, the opening of the human psyche to the plenitude of being human, here am I, with all my soul, accusing history of hiding from us that all revolutions to this day were inhumane acts of the True One (…)1. 23 At the end of her life, completely disenchanted, as proven in her texts, her native island brought back to her the isolation, the sacredness, an interior peregrination, peace, a source of divine love, Avalon. And she wrote about it in this polysemic universe. In Sonetos Românticos (Romantic Sonnets), masterfully facing, in the creative act, Mother Earth: (…) Jealous homeland, let’s take things into account: cold silver in my hair you claim And in damage, with purulent and shadows you affront, On the body, the image that the remains owe you (…)

Natália Correia, Introduction to 3rd ed. of Epístola aos Iamitas /Epistle to the Iamitas (1.ª ed., Lisboa, Publicações Dom Quixote, 1976)

in CORREIA Natália, Poesia Completa, O Sol nas Noites e o Luar nos Dias (Complete Poetry, The Sun in the Nights and the Moonlight in the Days), Op. Cit., p. 413. Natália Correia, “NECESSÁRIO É SATISFAZER O OFÍCIO DAS TREVAS”, III (“NECESSARY IT IS TO SATISFY THE PROFESSION OF DARKNESS”, III),

in CORREIA, Natália, SONETOS ROMÂNTICOS (ROMANTIC SONNETS), Lisboa, edições

in O Jornal, 1.ª ed., 1990, p. 59.

in Cultura Açores

Vision

To uphold and amplify the legacy of Natália Correia as a beacon of humanism, creativity, and freedom of thought. Through the Cátedra Natália Correia, we envision Fresno State as a transatlantic bridge where her voice continues to inspire critical reflection, cultural innovation, and the defense of democracy, justice, and imagination across generations and borders.

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Mission

The mission of the Cátedra Natália Correia is to preserve, study, and disseminate the life and work of Natália Correia as a writer, thinker, and cultural activist. Rooted in her belief in the transformative power of literature and art, we are committed to:

• Literature & Culture: Promoting reading, translation, and study of her writings and the broader Portuguese literary tradition.
• Education & Research: Supporting scholarship, conferences, and academic initiatives that deepen understanding of her humanistic vision.
• Freedom & Humanism: Championing values of liberty, equality, and social justice central to her work.
• Community & Diaspora: Engaging the Portuguese-American and Portuguese-Canadian communities in the United States and beyond, ensuring her words resonate with new audiences.
• Publication & Innovation: Encouraging creative projects, artistic collaborations, and publications that reinterpret her work for contemporary times