Teresa Gracia

Born in Barcelona to Aragonese parents, Teresa Gracia known not for her film roles, but for the extraordinary experiences that since became the subject of several collections of poetry and three plays. As a child of seven, Teresa and her mother were exiled to Francia after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), where they voluntarily entered in two different internment camps, Argeles-sur-mer and Saint-Cyprien. After escaping in Dec/Jan of 1940/1941, the Gracia family, reunited with Teresa's father, relocated to Toulouse, where many other Spanish republican refugees were living. Ms. Gracua was subsequently educated in French schools. After traveling and living briefly in Caracas, Venezuela and Paris, she studied at the Sorbonne and became involved in film, even as far as becoming linked to the director Eric Rohmer. In the early 1970s, Teresa Gracia moved to Rome, where she worked for the FAO. While in Rome, she wrote "Destierro" (Banishment) and "Las Republicanas" (The Female Republicans) the latter a dramatically-rendered poem dealing with her experiences in the internment camps. Due to increasingly failing health, Ms. Gracia eventually returned to Spain, definitively in 1980, five years after Franco's death and the subsequent return of a constitutional monarchy. Now settled in Madrid, Ms. Gracia published her works in a small press and subsequently wrote two more collections of poems, "Meditacion de la montana" (Meditation of the mountain) and "Manifiesto contra el verso libre" (Manifesto against free verse). She was also recently included in a 1998 anthology of Spanish poets entitled "8 poetas raros" (8 Strange Poets). She died on September 10, 2001, in Madrid, after battling a terminal condition for more than two decades.