Gabriela Mistral: A Poet and a Teacher
             in Chile, the name Gabriela Mistral is a well-known one. It is the name of perhaps the country's greatest poet and education activist. Gabriela Mistral is the pen name for Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. She wrote many poems throughout her lifetime and never failed to be a teacher. She was also the first Latin American to win a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945. Some of her best works include Desolación and Los Sonetas de la Muerte, which are just two of her many literary achievements.
             Mistral was born April 7, 1889 into the Chilean family of Jeronimo Godoy Alcayaga, a teacher of Indian and Jewish ancestry as well as a poet, and Petronila Alcayaga, who was a school teacher also. She also had an older stepsister Emelina, who was fifteen years older than Gabriela and became her first teacher . Mistral was born in Vicuña (located in northern Chile), but was raised in the village of Montegrande. Her father deserted the family when Gabriela was only 3 years old, leaving her mother to raise the two children alone. After he left, Gabriela's father visited his wife and children infrequently, but Mistral said later that he gave her the "love of poetry and the nomadic spirit of the perpetual traveler". From her mother Mistral gained a high respect for the mother figure and grew to understand the importance of motherhood.
             When Gabriela was nine, she started attending a formal school, but did so for only three years; an emotional three years for the young girl which led to her to turn to poetry to express her suffering . Later, in 1906, she tried to attend the Normal School in La Serena. She was denied admittance because school authorities saw her works as non-Christian and rebellious. She had been sending her writings to a regional newspaper and working as a teacher's aide to support herself and her mother when she was only a teenager. One of her printed articles ...