Showing posts with the label Steven Maginnis

Julia de Burgos stamp dismissed?

Commentary By Steven Maginnis There are few people more deserving of commemoration on a United States postage stamp than Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos.  De Burgos, who lived from 1914 to 1953, grew up in poverty in Puerto Rico but managed to go to college through a scholarship and become a teacher - effectively pulling herself up by her own bootstraps.  Later, through involvement with the Puerto Rican Nationalist party, she became a full-time writer and wrote about her love of Puerto Rico, the social struggles of the poor and oppressed, and her own feelings of entrapment and confinement. "Writing in the 1930s through the 1950s," one reviewer for  Publishers Weekly,  commented, "de Burgos was ahead of her time in grasping connections between history, the body, politics, love, self-negation and feminism that would later prove to be the foundations for writers like [Adrienne] Rich and [Sylvia] Plath."      In September 2010, Julia de Burgos - who died