Nobel Prize Recipient. Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poet, received world-wide professional recognition after being awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature. She became the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. According to the Nobel Prize committee, she received this covet award "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world." Since 1940, she received eight nominations for the Nobel candidacy with four being from Knut Hjalmar Leonard-Hammerskjold, a lawyer, politician, and member of the Swedish Academy. During her career, she published in her native language of Spanish 25 books with many being translated into English. She published hundreds of articles in magazines and newspapers throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, she used the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral as an author. This name was chosen in honor of two of her favorite authors, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral, 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. With a mixture of Spanish, Basque, and Indian ancestry, she was the daughter of a dilettante poet, who abandoned his family when she was three. Her mother was a seamstress and her fifteen-year-older sister was her teacher. Later in life, she learned that she had half-siblings, becoming the care giver for a half-nephew. At the age of fifteen years old, she began to teach school and write poetry. After a passionate first romance with a railroad employee, her lover committed suicide three years after they met. That experience along with her second lover marrying someone else, her poetry became more passionate. Starting in 1904, she first published her poetry in local newspapers. Being poor with no political connections, it was impossible for a female to attend school, but with the support of a priest who recognized her talent, she was able to attend a private school for a few years. In 1910 after being self-taught, she obtained her coveted teaching certification even though she had not followed a regular course of studies in college. In 1914, she was awarded a Chilean prize for three "Sonnets of Death." The University of Chile had granted her the academic title of Spanish Professor in 1923, although her formal education ended before she was 12 years old. By1921, she was the director of the newest most prestigious girls' school in Chile. In 1922, at the invitation of the Minister of Education, she traveled to Mexico to work with their school system for two years. She published in 1922, with the help of the Director of Hispanic Institute of New York, her first collection of poems, "Despair;" in her 1924 "Tenderness" collection, her theme was childhood; and in 1936 the collection "Tala" was published. In solidarity with the Spanish Republic, she donated her author's rights for the book "Tala" to the children displaced and orphaned by the Spanish Civil War. Her complete collection of poetry was published in 1958. When the teacher's union was going to require a college education to teach, she retired in 1925 from the Chilean Educational System with a pension, but it was stopped five years later. In 1938, she left Chile for political reasons and did not return until 1954. In 1943 during the stress of World War II, her nephew, who she had fostered since he was an abandoned infant, died from suicide in Italy; this caused her much grief. Although many of her poems were a part of her reoccurring loss and grief, she wrote poetry with themes of various relationships: mother and offspring, man and woman, individual and humankind, soul and God. She wrote about the "underdog." Besides being an important role in the educational systems of Mexico and Chile, she taught Spanish literature in the United States at Columbia University, Middlebury College, Vassar College, and at the University of Puerto Rico. While at the University of Puerto Rico in 1933, she was given her first of many doctorate Honoris Causa degrees. She was active in cultural committees of the League of Nations. Throughout her life she combined writing with a career as an educator, cultural minister, and Chilean diplomat; her diplomatic assignments included posts in Madrid, Lisbon, Genoa, Naples and Nice. For ten years, she suffered with diabetes and heart problems, but eventually died with the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in a New York City hospital. After a funeral ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, the body of this pacifist woman was flown by military plane to Santiago, where she received the funeral honors of a national hero. Her last resting place was her childhood village. Besides the Nobel Prize, in 1951 she was awarded the National Literature Prize in Chile. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note and a postage stamp.