Translations:Amira De la Rosa/4/en

Amira de la Rosa was a Colombian writer, playwright, and diplomat born on January 7, 1895 in the city of Barranquilla. Granddaughter of the liberal poet and politician Diogenes Arrieta, she was the eldest of the eight brothers and sisters of the Arrieta McGregor family. She attended primary and secondary school at La Presentación in Barranquilla, and it was there that she began to show an early interest in writing, poetry, and teaching. At the age of eighteen she married lawyer Reginaldo de la Rosa Ortega, with whom she would have a son, Ramiro. Later, given her interest in teaching, Amira would travel to Barcelona to take an international course for teachers, directed by Maria Montessori. In Barcelona she met the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral, who was also a student, with whom she would forge a great lifelong friendship. Upon her return to Colombia in the 1920s, she and her sisters founded the Gabriela Mistral School in Barranquilla, as a sign of admiration and homage to the poet. Later she would travel to Madrid to study journalism at the School of Journalism of the Catholic newspaper El Debate, specializing in theater and theater criticism. Once there, Amira began working for the Colombian diplomatic service, where she worked for twenty-five years until 1971. She worked first as an advisor and cultural attaché of the Colombian Embassy in Madrid and later as a consul in the city of Seville.