El siete de abril/April 7th
¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga)! (1889-1957) Image from Biblioteca Yacucho. Click HERE . A Chilean poet, educator, and diplomat, she was the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1945), and she remains the only Latin American woman to have won the prize to date. As this 2003 New York Times article asserts, there is probably "no town in [Chile] that does not have a street, square or school named for her." Her image also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note. Born in Vicuña, Chile to a seamstress mother and a guitar-playing, poetry-writing father who abandoned the family when she was three, Mistral grew up surrounded by the Andes Mountains. Though she only attended school until she was 11, she nonetheless began writing poetry at the age of 13. A year later, she became a teacher's aide and discovered a passion for the classroom that would never wane. She taught elementary and secondary school for ye...