El diecinueve de mayo/May 19th
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| Poniatowska before receiving the Premio Cervantes in 2013. Photo accompanies an interview about her book on Lupe Marín, the second wife of muralist Diego Rivera. Click HERE. |
A Mexican journalist and author who was born in France after her family fled the Mexican Revolution, Poniatowska has more than forty books to her name. Much of her work focuses on social injustice in Mexico, especially for women and the poor. In 2014 she won the Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language (read more in the L.A. Times article, HERE). Poniatowska, whose first language is French, lived there for the first ten years of her life. When she was ten, she and her mother moved back to Mexico to flee World War II, while her father stayed in France to fight (he participated in D Day). She spent some time in the late 1940s being educated in the United States, at Eden Hall, a convent boarding school of the Sacred Heart near Philadelphia. She did not go to a university, but rather began working for the Mexican paper Excélsior when she returned to Mexico. Because she was a woman, she was given assignments for the "society" pages and was not considered a serious journalist, but she said the experience is what taught her to write. In an interview with The Paris Review in the spring 2018 issue, she explains:
"I learned, as they say, by doing ... Since Excélsior is a daily paper, I had to produce these pieces every day with almost no time for review. Then I would read them in print and see that I had spent too much time of little importance and failed to ask about what mattered most. And so, with frequent embarrassment, that is how I learned."
Poniatowska made it to writing about more serious topics. Two of her most famous books are about the massacre of student protesters in Mexico in 1968 (La Noche de Tlatelolco) and the suffering and horrors that followed the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City (Nada, nadie). She and astronomer Guillermo Haro, who she had met while interviewing him in 1959, were married from 1968 to 1988 and have three children together.
Poniatowska, who lives in Mexico City in a modest, book-filled home, taught a writing workshop for more than 30 years, thus having a profound influence on the younger generation of Mexican writers. She often travels the world to lecture and present. Her most recent book was 2012's collection of short stories The Heart of the Artichoke (El corazón de la alcochofa), an international bestseller. See a short video in which she talks about the challenges of establishing herself in a male-based profession ("Modern Figures," made in conjunction with the movie Hidden Figures) HERE, and hear her talk about what the many prizes she has won mean to her HERE.
For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.
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