Gabriela Mistral was one of the most famous poets to come out of Chile, and the first poet from a Latin American nation to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lived a colorful and active life, visiting foreign cities as a representative of Chile, and was recognized as an expert in education throughout the Americas. Her father was a schoolteacher who married a widow who already had a fifteen-year-old daughter. On April 7, 1889, Mistral was born as Lucia Goday Alcayaga in Vicuna, in the Elqui valley in northern Chile. When she was three, her father abandoned the family, and she was raised and educated by her mother and her half-sister Emilina, who were both teachers. She spent her childhood in the natural, rural setting of the Elqui valley.

By the time she was fifteen, she was already a teaching assistant. At eighteen she met Romello Ureta...