The following cross-post was written by Catalina Gómez, Reference Librarian, Hispanic Division. It originally appeared on the 4 Corners of the World blog.
As Women’s History Month comes to a close and National Poetry Month approaches, this moment presents itself as the perfect opportunity to honor the work of women in poetry. For this, we have chosen to highlight three of the most beloved women poets of the Luso-Hispanic world: Gabriela Mistral from Chile, Ida Vitale from Uruguay, and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen from Portugal. We celebrate the lives and work of these three towering figures of the 20th century, but more importantly, we honor their voices (along with those of women poets everywhere) by sharing the recordings that each of them did for the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape (AHLOT) here in the Library of Congress. The AHLOT is a collection of audio recordings curated by the Library’s Hispanic Division since 1943, and featuring poets and prose writers from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, and the Hispanic community of the United States reading from their works.
Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957)
Gabriela Mistral recorded for the Library’s Archive in 1950 in the Thomas Jefferson Building’s Recording Laboratory. Her birth name was Lucila Godoy Alcayaga and she was born in Vicuña, Chile, in 1889. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945), she is considered one of Latin America’s most prominent figures in poetry. She authored throughout her life twelve books of poetry, including “Desolación” (Desolation) (1922), “Ternura