Levins Morales became a public writer in the 1970s as a result of the many social justice movements of that time that addressed the importance of giving a voice to the oppressed.
At age fifteen, she was the youngest member of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and co-produced a feminist radio show, took part in sit-ins and demonstrations against the Vietnam War, guerrilla theater, women's consciousness raising groups, and door-to-door organizing for daycare and equal pay.
[8] In 1976, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked at the KPFA Third World News Bureau, reporting on events in South Africa, the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua and what was still Rhodesia, and on environmental racism, housing struggles, and the movement to get the US Navy to stop bombing Vieques, Puerto Rico.
[9] Levins Morales became part of a radical US women of color writers movement that sought to integrate the struggles against sexism and racism.
She began doing coffeehouse readings with other women, organizing poetry series, producing radio programs, publishing in literary journals and anthologies, and eventually becoming one of the contributors to This Bridge Called My Back, where she focuses on depicting the race, class, and gender issues that together shape Puerto Rican women's identities and historical experiences.
[10][11] In 1986, Levins Morales and her mother wrote Getting Home Alive, a collection of poetry and prose about their lives as US Puerto Rican women.
In an attempt to “heal” this historical trauma of oppression, she designs a “medicinal” history that gives centrality to the marginalized, particularly Puerto Rican women.
In August, 2019 she published a collection of prose poems entitled Silt, about the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea, exploring their natural and social landscapes.
[16] In 2009, she traveled to Cuba for medical care, and received two month-long cycles of treatment at the Centro Internacional de Restauración Neurológica in Havana, as a result of which she no longer uses a wheelchair.
[12][15] After her mother, Rosario, died in 2011, Aurora Levins Morales moved in with her father in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home.