27 Jul Crossing Harvard Yard by Olga Karman (1940-2025)

About the Poet

Olga Karman (1940-2025) a leading figure in the Buffalo writing community for nearly five decades and a former member of the Board of Directors of Just Buffalo Literary Center, died on July 9 after a brief illness.

A poet, memoirist, fiction writer, and community leader, Karman was a professor of Spanish Language and Literature for over two decades at D’Youville College (now D’Youville University) and served as the college’s Director of Community Affairs. Her poetry collections include Adios (Just Buffalo Literary Center, 1984) and Border Crossing (The Buffalo Press, 1990). In 1997, she returned to visit Cuba after 37 years. While there she gathered material for her much-praised memoir Scatter My Ashes Over Havana (Pureplay Press, 2006) and her fiction collection A Woman of Some Years (2010).

Olga Elena Karman was born on September 22, 1940, in Havana, to Roberto Karman and Elsa Karman y Terry, and graduated from the distinguished Ruston Academy of Havana in 1958.

When Fidel Castro’s regime came to power in 1959, she sympathized with the aims of the revolution, but when Castro cancelled elections and built his one-person rule, she left Cuba and moved to the United States to marry her American fiancé. Feeling isolated and removed from her culture as a young mother in rural Connecticut, she enrolled in Connecticut College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1966, and became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

She subsequently was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Harvard University, where she earned her PhD in Latin American Literature in 1976. Her PhD dissertation was on the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s neo-Baroque novel Paradiso.

After moving to Buffalo in 1976, she taught high-school Spanish at Nichols School before becoming a professor D’Youville College, where she remained for twenty-seven years. Her first published poem in English appeared in the former The Buffalo News Poetry Page in 1976, the first year of its existence and the first year of her life in Buffalo. Over the decades, her poems were featured in many journals and literary magazines, including The Nation and The New Republic.

Olga was a lifelong member of the Democratic Party who supported, and campaigned for, many candidates over the years. She worked on the campaign to elect Governor Mario Cuomo and was then appointed to the board of the Governor’s Advisory Committee for Hispanic Affairs. She was a strong supporter of former Judge Raul Figueroa and former Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello. She served on Mayor Masiello’s transition team and was a founding member of Western New York Hispanics and Friends. She was a member of the transition committee that created Hispanics United of Buffalo. She became a supporter and friend of former New York State Assembly Member Sam Hoyt and a mentor, close personal friend, and true champion of Congressman Timothy Kennedy, now serving in the United States House of Representatives.

At D’Youville University, Olga taught Spanish, Spanish for the Health Professions, and worked from the outset to create Leonardo Da’Vinci High School for the Buffalo Public School District in partnership with D’Youville College. She spent her later years as a certified Spanish language interpreter for the New York State Board of Parole. Olga served on the Board of Directors of Just Buffalo Literary Center from 2011 to 2018. She continued writing poems and short works of prose and fiction until her death.

Her grieving family will hold a Remembrance of Life at a later date in the late summer or early fall.

The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.