User:AMM Pittsburgh/Leonor de Ovando

Leonor de Ovando (1544 – c.1611) was a Dominican poet, writer and cloistered nun. She has been widely recognized as one of the first Dominican poets as well as one of the first from the New World.

Biography
Leonor was born in Santo Domingo into a wealthy Hispaniola family (now the Dominican Republic) and had at least three brothers.

She joined a cloistered convent in her hometown and "must have been one of the first professed at the Dominican Monastery of Regina Angelorum." She later became its prioress.

She was accused of “interference in non-religious matters” for her complaints to the king about abuses committed on the island by Governor Osorio.

In 1586, the city of Santo Domingo was attacked by Englishman Francis Drake, known locally as "the Terror of the Caribbean," whose forces occupied the city for a month and forced the congregation, including the 46-year-old prioress Ovando, to abandon the convent and take refuge in the countryside. "Francis Drake's attack in 1586 [had] devastated Hispaniola to the ground." The destruction was widespread and long-lasting, and forced the nuns to rely on neighbors for sustenance for several years. It also resulted in the loss of some of Ovando's literary production.

She is widely recognized as being one of the first poets in the New World. Although Ovando's date of death is uncertain, the Real Academy of History lists it as 1611. Other sources say she probably died sometime "after 1609" or "between 1610 and 1612."

Currently, there is a street named in her honor in Santo Domingo.

Selected works
Five of Ovando's sonnets and some individual verses, written between 1574 and 1580, have been preserved in Silva's anthology of poetry, compiled by Eugenio de Salazar during the years 1585 to 1595 and preserved in the Real Academy of History in Madrid, Spain. This literary production had remained unpublished until it was discovered by the Spanish literary critic Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and described in his Anthology of Hispanic-American Poets. The compositions were the result of correspondence between Ovando and Salazar. Four of the five sonnets correspond to special festivals on the Catholic calendar: Christmas, Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost.

According to Justo Planas, Ovando's surviving works are indicative of early culture on the island."Her poems, in dialogue with the Spanish [writer] Eugenio de Salazar, are evidence that there was a literate community in Hispaniola. The only one that has survived today of her poetic voice was part of a concert. This is made evident by the fluency of her verse that comes from a habitual practice and a context of critical readers and writers to emulate."

Selected bibliography

 * Marrero Fente, Raul (2010). "Gender, convent and writing: the poetry of Sor Leonor de Ovando in the colonial Caribbean". America without a name: bulletin of the Research Unit of the University of Alicante "Recoveries of the pre-Columbian and colonial world in the Spanish-American twentieth century" (15). ISSN  1577-3442.
 * Nacidit Perdomo, Ylonka. Native Poetesses of the Spanish Baroque of the Island of Santo Domingo.