El ocho de marzo/March 8th

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¡Feliz Día Internacional de la Mujer!

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Juana de América (Juana Fernández Morales de Ibarbourou)! (1892-1979)

Image form todouruguay.net. Click HERE.
Site has detailed biography (in Spanish)
of de Ibarbourou. 
Juana de Ibarbourou, or "Juana de América," as she was widely known, was a Uruguayan poet who was popular in Spanish America. She was admired by the poets Federico García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez, who both visited her at her home in Montevideo, and she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. Though she never won the Nobel Prize, she was recognized with many other honors, including the National Grand Prize for Literature in Uruguay in 1959. In 2008 Uruguayan Diego Fischer published a popular biography of her, Al encuentro de las tres Marías, and in 2010 he produced a play of the same name (read more HERE). "Juana is one of the most important symbols of Uruguay and my book tried to show the true Juana, not the Juana of bronze or marble that we studied in school, but rather the woman of light and shadow," Fischer commented. A movie based on the biography, starring Natalia Oreiro as young Juana and Norma Aleandro (of the 1985 Academy Award Winner The Official Story) as the mature Juana was set to premiere in 2017, though (as far as I have found), it has not yet been released (read more about the movie HERE). Juana de Ibarbourou's image appears on the 1000 peso bill in Uruguay (about $35), and her house in Melo, where she was born, is a museum. Her official manuscripts and personal correspondence are housed in the archives of Harvard and Stanford Universities.

For a lesson on de Ibarbourou on a Uruguayan educational site for children, click HERE.

For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.






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