Cabral, Olga

CABRAL, OLGA (1909-1997). Born in Trinidad, Olga Cabral moved with her Portuguese parents first to Winnipeg, Canada and soon thereafter to New York City, her home for the rest of her life. As a young woman, she worked as a stenographer and, during off hours, wrote in a variety of genres. In addition to poetry, she wrote pulp fiction. In the late 1930s and early 1940s published in Thrilling Mysteries, Weird Tales and Strange Stories, considered by scholars the most important fantasy magazines published in the United States.

By the 1930s, however, Cabral had found an additional venue in the little magazines of the Left, mainly the New Masses, and also in the Communist Daily Worker. Through the literati networks of these publications, she secured a publisher for poems written across several decades. Cities and Deserts (1959) put her on a path to winning several prestigious awards. Many of her poems reflect upon the conditions of life, especially for people of color, in what had once been Walt Whitman’s native land. In 1948, she published The Seven Sneezes, a children’s book that continues to be known as a Golden Book classic.

Cabral found her kindred spirit with her second husband, Aaron Kurtz (1891-1964), a famed Yiddish poet, critic, and editor, whom she married in 1951. She survived him by more than thirty years. “I have lived through all he wars of this century,” she reflected, “together with the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, the cynical witch hunts of McCarthyism, the atom bomb, the Cold War –I’ve seen it all. The twentieth century. My century.”

Cabral, Olga. VOICE/OVER: Selected poems of Olga Cabral. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1993.

Olga Cabral Papers. Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. Boston University. http://archives.bu.edu/collections/subjects?id=520993