D.C. resident and award-winning poet Mayamerica Cortez was honored in June by the deputy foreign minister of El Salvador for strengthening Salvadoran culture through literature.

Cortez was born in El Salvador but emigrated to the U.S. in 1980 to escape her country’s civil war, leaving her three children behind for a time until she had a stable life here in the Washington area. She published her first book in El Salvador in 1976, “Lumbre de Soledad” (“Fire of Solitude”), but took 19 years off before publishing her next piece as she struggled to bring her children to the U.S. and adjust to life here. She recently read some of her work to Montgomery County residents at a Gaithersburg library.