[1] Lee returned to Mississippi at age 14 to attend Blue Mountain College (then scaled like a prep school).

[1] Lee taught herself Spanish and got a job with the United States Secret Service in New York City, where she worked as a translator during World War I.

All were translated by Nicaraguan poet Salomón de la Selva, who was editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine).

[1] It was through her poetry being translated into Spanish and published in the Pan American magazines that she met her future husband Luis Muñoz Marín, a Puerto Rican poet and journalist.

He had started a new bilingual magazine "devoted to Pan-American culture," called Revista de Indias (Indies Review), and wanted to publish her work.

[2] They were often separated; Muñoz Marín lived in Greenwich Village for extended periods, due to his dependence on opium, in the 1920s as he continued to work at poetry.

She became immersed in Latin American poetry and began to work on a project of an anthology of poets in Spanish.

[1] She became an advocate for and translator of Latin American literature, making major contributions to the modern Pan-American literary tradition.

In 1927 Lee started working for the University of Puerto Rico as director of International Relations, where she served for nearly a decade.

[1] Lee became involved in feminist activism, making important contributions to the modern women's movement, in particular the struggle for equal rights.

[1] She helped represent Puerto Rico and joined with women of Latin America at the Sixth Pan American Congress in 1928 in Havana.

She produced 37 translations of poems by twenty writers for the groundbreaking book, Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry (1941), published by New Directions.

[1] In a separate endeavor, from 1934 to 1938, Lee wrote five detective novels under the pen name Newton Gayle (co-authored with Maurice Guinness, an American Shell Oil executive in Puerto Rico).

[4] She worked with the State Department until 1965, retiring two months before her death from lung cancer on April 3, 1965, in San Juan.

She had long worked for her vision of "our achieving what she called Pan-American character, a multicultural American ethos composed of 'aboriginal copper, carbon of Ethiopia, Latin dream, and stark Anglo-Saxon reality'.