The Book of Emma Reyes, A Memoir in Correspondence by Emma Reyes (1919-2003). Translated and with an introduction by Daniel Alarcón (185 pages). In 23 letters written during her twenties, Emma Reyes recounts stunning stories of her childhood, retaining the pure, unfiltered perception of childhood, making her hardships even more poignant. 

Orphaned or abandoned in the slums of Bogotá, Columbia, knowing only filth and poverty, shuttled into a convent, living at the bottom of class system and in illiterate ignorance, these letters take us only up to her escape from the convent at age nineteen.  

I recommend that anyone who can read it in the original Spanish should do so; I wish I could have, but I did enjoy the translation. I wish more of her writings could be published--reportedly she left 14 trunks of papers. She is most well-known as a painter.