Early Childhood and Education

Estelle Diane Roses was born on November 13, 1937, in Paterson, New Jersey. Her father, Morris Jerome Roses, owned a small office and card supply store, and her mother, Ceil Pearl Roses, was a homemaker.

In 1955, Dr. Irizarry graduated from East Side High School in Paterson, New Jersey, later made famous by the 1987 film Lean on Me. She received her B.A. from Montclair State College (now University) in 1959; her M.A. from Rutgers University in 1963; and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from George Washington University in 1970. In the early 1960s, Dr. Irizarry also studied and later taught for a time at the University of Puerto Rico. It was during that time that she met Manuel Antonio Irizarry (b. 1928 – d. 2014), of Rosario, Puerto Rico, whom she married in 1963.

Career

Teacher

In 1970, Dr. Irizarry was appointed Professor of Spanish at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. From 1993 to 2000, she was Editor-in-Chief of Hispania , the quarterly journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, which includes articles on pedagogy, literature, linguistics, and technology-assisted language instruction related to the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian worlds.

Author

Dr. Irizarry was the author of 40 books and over 150 articles in international journals. Dr. Irizarry wrote books on individual Spanish authors Francisco Ayala, Rafael Dieste, Odón Betanzos Palacios, and E. Fernández Granell, as well as thematic topics: literary jokes in The Literary Joke in Our Days (1979) and writer-painters in Spanish Writers-Painters of the  20th Century (1991).

A specialist in literary computing, he showed what could be achieved with Hispanic examples in Informática y literatura (1997, jointly edited by Proyecto/A Ediciones and the University of Puerto Rico). Another contribution of this type was his annotated edition, with a grant from the Fifth Centennial Commission of the Discovery of America and Puerto Rico, of the first novel published in the New World, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, resolving the question of authorship with computer analysis, showing that the Puerto Rican protagonist Ramírez was a co-author.

In Puerto Rican literature, he has published seven titles on Enrique A. Laguerre, in addition to the introduction to Ricardo Alegría's four-volume centennial compilation of Laguerre's complete novels. Other titles include Studies on Enrique A. Laguerre (Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, 2005), a critical edition of Seva by Luis López Nieves (Cara y Cruz, Grupo Editorial Norma, 2006), The Art of Distortion in Luis Lopez Nieves (Terranova), and, in Ediciones Puerto, three books on José Elías Levis: The Voice that Broke the Silence: The Singular Novels of J. Elías Levis in Puerto Rico Post-1898, and critical editions of New Life and The Dregs Heap in two versions.

Christopher Columbus

In 2009, Dr. Irizarry published The DNA of Christopher Columbus’s Writings, which became an instant bestseller. After an extensive study of the explorer’s official documents and personal letters, Dr. Irizarry postulated that Columbus was not the son of a Genoese craftsman but rather of the Kingdom of Aragon and that his native language was Catalan. She further proposed that Columbus’s origins are not obscure by chance, but rather the result of the famous explorer deliberately concealing the fact that he was Jewish or a “converso” (i.e., a convert to Christianity). Dr. Irizarry, a professor of linguistics, came to that conclusion after examining Columbus’s writings in detail and discovering a simple but important clue that had eluded other researchers: a slash symbol that Columbus used to indicate pauses in sentences. This symbol, also known as “virgule”, did not appear in texts of that time written in Spanish, nor in writings from any other country, but only in records and letters from the Catalan-speaking areas of the Iberian Peninsula, specifically present-day Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. Dr. Irizarry received the Grand National Prize at the International Book Fair in Puerto Rico 2010 for the book.

Personal life and death

Dr. Irizarry passed away on March 17, 2017, from complications related to Parkinson's disease, which she was diagnosed with in 1999. She was preceded in death by Manuel, her husband of 50 years, who passed away on August 28, 2014. She is survived by her three sons, Michael Carl Irizarry, Steven Edward Irizarry, and Nelson Paul Irizarry, as well as seven grandchildren.

Works

The Surrealist Inventiveness of EF Granell, Insula, Madrid, 1976.

Studies on Rafael Dieste (Broken memory: exiles and heterodoxies. Studies Series)

The Art of Distortion in Luis Lopez Nieves

Writer-Painters of Contemporary Spain, Georgetown University, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1984.

The Voice That Broke the Silence: The Singular Novelistic of J. Elias Levis in Puerto Rico Post-1898

The novels The Dunghill (1899) and The Dunghill (1901) , 2008.

The DNA of Christopher Columbus's writings , 2009.

Christopher Columbus' Love Letter to Queen Isabella , 2011.

Awards and Honors

• Tomás Barros Essay Prize, 1990
• Literature Award, Puerto Rico Institute in New York, 1996
• Full member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy, 1995
• Cross of Spain of the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise, Ministry of Culture of Spain, 1998.
• National Grand Prize of the International Book Fair in Puerto Rico, 2010.

External links

• CNN Jewish Columbus (in English)
• Herald Tribune Archived March 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine . (in English)
• Medieval News (in English)
• Christopher Columbus writer