The Nobel Prize–winning poet Gabriela Mistral is celebrated by her native Chile as the “mother of the nation” even though she spent most of her life in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. Throughout the Spanish-speaking world and especially in Chile, Mistral was characterized as a sad, traditionally Catholic spinster. Yet her voluminous correspondence with Doris Dana, long believed to be her secretary, reveals that the two women were lovers from 1948 until Mistral’s death in 1957. These letters, published in Spanish in 2010 and now translated for the first time into English, provide insight into her work as a poet and illuminate her perspectives on politics, especially war and human rights. The correspondence also sheds light on the poet’s personal life and corrects the long-standing misperceptions of her as a lonely, single, heterosexual woman.

Lambda Literary: Most Anticipated Book of the Month A poignant collage of stories of women young and old, this novel from an Alfaguara Prize–winning author explores both the need to be seen and the need to disappear. In present-day New York, Margarita grapples with insecurities on her fifty-sixth birthday. She feels neglected by her husband, and suspects he’s having an affair with one of his students. Mysteries surrounding two friends offer both a distraction and unexpected insight: Anne, the concierge of her apartment building, has suddenly vanished without a trace, leaving Anne’s mother to confront a long-held secret. Juliana, now in her eighties, is eager to find the woman who changed the course of her life more than sixty years ago. With a seamless blend of reality and fiction, Carla Guelfenbein takes us back to the 1940s to provide answers, drawing on the intimate letters that Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral wrote to her lover and executor, Doris Dana, in the years after their first meeting at Barnard College. Struggling under the weight of Gabriela’s intense attachment, the much younger Doris enjoys a passionate night of sex and alcohol with a childhood friend while they’re apart. Far from the chaste, self-sacrificing image imposed on Mistral after her death because she never married, the characters of One in Me I Never Loved reflect womanhood in all its complexities, challenging the limits on their freedom and sexuality.

A Queer Mother for the Nation weaves a nuanced understanding of how Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, cooperated with authority and fashioned herself as the figure of Motherhood in collaboration with the state.

Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein released the first issue of the poetics newsletter L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in 1978, launching language-centered writing. The Language Letters reveals Language poetry in its nascent stage, with letters written by Andrews, Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and others in intense and intimate conversation regarding poetry and poetics; the contemporary poetry and arts scenes; publication venues, journals, and magazines; and issues of community, camaraderie, and friendship. The editors have included two critical introductions, two interviews with Bernstein and Andrews, and appendices that include a previously unpublished essay on Larry Eigner by Robert Grenier and short biographies of the major authors. Written between 1970 and 1978, these letters detail the development of the concepts and styles that came to define one of the most influential movements in post-1960s writing. Scholars, writers, and students of poetry will find this collection essential to understanding this important period of literary history.

Solicita información sobre la vida religiosa de Gabriela Mistral y su fe católica.

Women in War provides an in-depth analysis of women's experiences in the FMLN guerrilla army in El Salvador, and examines the consequences of those experiences for their post war lives. It also develops a new model for investigating and understanding micro-level mobilization processes that has applications to many social movement settings.

REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994–2008). Marshaling over a decade’s worth of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico–US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates—City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period’s consolidation of Mexico–US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists’ remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman. A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy—what Carroll terms the “allegorical performative”—REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists’ embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art’s “undocumentation” of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book’s featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California’s Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico’s war on drugs.