The eldest of 13 children, born into poverty on Feb. 17, 1914 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, Julia Constanza Burgos Garcia trained and worked as a teacher; she married at 20 years old, before divorcing three years later and choosing to add "de," indicating possession, to her maiden name. She self-published her first poetry collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows) in 1938. As a divorced woman of African descent in conservative, Catholic Puerto Rico, de Burgos did not fit in with other Puerto Rican intellectuals and left the island and moved to New York with her lover, Dominican intellectual Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón, in 1940, vowing never to return.
Later that year, de Burgos went with Jimenes Grullón to Cuba to study at the University of Havana, and in July 1940 she won a Puerto Rican literary award for her second poetry collection, Canción de la verdad sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth). By 1942, her relationship with Jimenes Grullón had deteriorated, and she returned to New York City, becoming a contributor and arts and culture editor for the Spanish-language socialist periodical Pueblos Hispanos.
In 1943, de Burgos remarried, with this marriage also ending in divorce. The final years of her life were difficult: De Burgos developed depression and alcoholism, and died without identification on July 5, 1953, being buried anonymously on the city's potter's field on Hart Island before her family had her remains repatriated to Puerto Rico. Her final poetry collection, El mar y tú: otros poemas (The Sea and You: Other Poems), was published posthumously by her sister Consuelo in 1954. De Burgos was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Puerto Rico in 1987, and the United States Postal Service honored her with a stamp (pictured above) in 2010 for Hispanic Heritage Month.