Marigloria Palma

Marigloria Palma was born September 6, 1921, as Gloria María Pagán y Ferrer in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico. She left school after the eighth grade to work as a maid, cashier, secretary, and seamstress until she found a position as a photographer’s assistant in Viejo San Juan. After her friend and contemporary Julia de Burgos, she was the second woman to win the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture's national poetry prize for her debut, Agua Suelta (Loose Water, 1942).

In 1944, Palma moved to New York City, where she worked for Juan Corretjer's Spanish-language newspaper Pueblos Hispanos alongside Julia de Burgos. Two years later, Palma married the exiled Austrian Jewish philosopher Alfred Stern and lived with him in Pasadena, California, for twenty years before returning to Viejo San Juan in the mid-1960s. 

As an artist and writer Palma worked across many media—drawing, painting, theater, fiction, children's literature, folklore, journalism, poetry—and published more than a dozen books, including Versos de cada día [Daily Verses] (1981); La noche y otras flores eléctricas [The Night & Other Electric Flowers] (1976); and San Juan entre dos azules [San Juan Between Two Blues] (1965). 

In her later years, she was a regular columnist for Puerto Rico Ilustrado and El Mundo, writing on such diverse topics as U.S. militarism, the visitor economy, and the power and perils of nostalgia. She died in 1994 and is buried in Viejo San Juan's storied cemetery Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzis.