Lorna Dee Cervantes's Biography

Visit her on her blog at http:lornadice.blogspot.com

A fifth generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a pivotal figure throughout the Chicano literary movement. She began publishing the literary journal Mango in the mid-1970s. Her small press, also named Mango, was widely admired for its creative designs and for the important voices it first brought into print, including Sandra Cisneros, Luis Omar Salinas, Ray Gonzalez, Jimmy Santiago Baca and Alberto Ríos among them.

Cervantes is a dynamic poet whose work draws tremendous power from her struggles in the literary and political trenches. Her power is channeled by a keen intellect and careful attention to craft, which allows her to explore the boundaries between language and experience. Joy Harjo says of her poetry, "Lorna Dee Cervantes is a daredevil... We are transfixed as she juggles rage, cruelties, passion. There is no net. Seven generations uphold the trick of survival. No one is alone in this amazing act of love."

Her poetry has appeared in literally hundreds of literary magazines and she has been featured on the cover of Bloomsbury Review and other literary journals. Her work has also been included in many anthologies, including Daughters of the Fifth Sun (1995), ¡Floricanto Sí! A Collection of Latina Poetry (Penguin, 1998), Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (1994), No More Masks!

An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets (1993), and After Aztlan:
Latino Poets of the Nineties (1992). Cervantes' poems have appeared in over 150 textbooks, including mainstays such as The Norton Anthology of American Literature and The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Cervantes' first book, Emplumada (University of Pittsburgh, 1981), a recipient of the American Book Award, was praised as "a seamless collection of poems that move back and forth between the gulf of desire and possibility."

Her second collection, From the Cables of Genocide:
Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público, 1991) was awarded the Patterson Poetry Prize, the poetry prize of the Institute of Latin American Writers, and the Latino Literature Award. In 1995 she received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

Cervantes holds an A.B.D. in the History of Consciousness; she is an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder where until recently she directed the creative writing program. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships, a prestigious Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes and numerous other grants and awards.