years old. Early success When she was only fifteen, Espaillat's high school English teacher, Catherine Haydon Jacobs, took an interest in her poetry and, without Espaillat's knowledge, submitted them to The Ladies Home Journal. To Espaillat's shock, she received a letter from the magazine's editor saying that three of her poems had been accepted for publication. Espaillat later recalled that, as she read the editor's letter, she thought, "This can't be happening! This only happens to poets!" Following her November 1947 debut, Espaillat's poetry regularly appeared in The Ladies' Home Journal and, eventually, in a British magazine as well. The resulting exposure caused her to receive a large number of fan letters. Catherine Jacobs also sent Espaillat's poems to the Poetry Society of America, which changed its rules to accept Espaillat, who was then only 16-years old, as the Poetry Society's youngest ever member. When she was seventeen, Espaillat received a fan letter from Shabani, in Southern Rhodesia, from an admirer who had translated one of her poems into Afrikaans and who was requesting permission to publish the translation. Espaillat received similar fan letters from poetry lovers throughout the United States, as well as in Manila, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and London. During the same era, Espaillat also acted as a literary mentor to a young girl who had written to her from the American Zone of Occupied Germany, where the girl's father was serving with the United States military. This ultimately led, according to Espaillat's biographers, "to a close and enduring friendship." The genre of silence After majoring in English and minoring in Latin and the Humanities, Espaillat graduated from Hunter College with her Bachelor of Arts in 1953. Following her 1952 interracial marriage to Alfred Moskowitz, however, Espaillat drifted for a long time out of contact with the Poetry Society of America while working as a public school teacher and raising her TWO sons in Flushing, Queens. During her long absence from American poetry, Espaillat relied heavily upon the mentorship and encouragement of Alfred Dorn, who would go on to become one of the founders of New Formalism. Following the CIA-backed assassination of Rafael Trujillo on May 20, 1961, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy's use of coercive diplomacy to effect regime change in the Dominican Republic on November 19, 1961, Espaillat's relatives at last felt able to safely travel to the United States and visit Espaillat, her