The work of Zamora, who is still living, gained some traction in the 1990s when Bill Moyer featured her in his TV poetry Series, The Power of the Word. I believe that Gabriela Mistral is one of several Latin American poets- from Alfonsina Storni to Daisy Zamora- whose lives and poetry are relatively under-represented to U.S. Her complete poetry was published in 1958.

Their strong emotion and themes of children and childhood and women’s personal, mythical and public concerns, all continued into her later poetry and are revealed in titles such as “Mujer Fuerte” (“Strong Woman”) and “Antigona” (“Antigone”). It established her reputation in her native Chile and throughout Latin America, where still today she is referred to as “Gabriela.” Later her books Desolacion (Despair) in 1922, Ternura (Tenderness) in 1924, and Tala in 1938 reached a wider audience. When she was 20, she suffered the loss of her beloved, Romelio Ureta, to suicide, and out of that loss wrote, Sonetos a la Muerte (Sonnets of Death), which won the Chilean poetry prize in 1914.

She died in 1957 in the U.S., where she was living at the time. All the while, she continued to write poetry that was moving, well-crafted, and visionary. Throughout her life, she remained a worldwide leader in the two cultural areas of education and literature, employed as a professor, lecturer, administrator, poet and writer in Chile, Mexico, the U.S., and several European countries. Today, she is one of the fourteen women worldwide to have won the award.īorn Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga in a small Andean town far from the big city of Santiago in 1889, she began publishing her poetry in Chilean newspapers under her pen name by the time she was 16 while at the same time she worked to become a professional teacher. readers in 1945 when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first and only Latin American woman to have done so. Gabriela Mistral was the pen name for the Chilean poet who became most widely known to U.S. Learn about the history of Foremother Poets feature. (Originally published on WOMPO listserv Website circa 2000)

Selected poems of gabriela mistral