Craft: Julia de Burgos
Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) was a Puerto Rican poet also known for her essays and vignettes on the cultural, social, feminist, and political spheres of Puerto Rico and its attempts at independence from the United States.
Burgos’s childhood was as tough as they come: she was the oldest of 13 children and six of her siblings died of disease and malnutrition. She became a US Citizen after the passage of the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917. She graduated from the University of Puerto Rico in 1933 with a teaching certificate. In 1936, she joined the Women’s United Front for the Constitutional Convention of Puerto Rico. Burgos’s first two poetry collections were published in Puerto Rico before she moved to New York in 1940. The third was published posthumously by her sister, Consuelo.
Burgos was not translated into English in her lifetime, other than by anonymous FBI agents who opened a file on her that eventually expanded to over 100 pages. In 1997, Jack Agüeros published a bilingual edition of her poems called Song of the Simple Truth (Northwestern University Press). This new edition, I Am My Own Path, is a critical edition, and includes a substantive introduction, as well as Burgos’s essays, interviews she did as a journalist , and letters to her family.
Sadly, Burgos had a long history of alcoholism and was diagnosed with cirrhosis and
