In a book review for Emplumada, Whyatt Frances writes about what defines Cervantes’s characteristic Chicana heritage: “Freeways, cactus, factory towns, rattlesnakes, heat, the dusty land of big sky: California and the American Southwest; this is Lorna Dee Cervantes' personal ‘barrio,’ her community of nature, poverty, animistic gods, eccentric amigos, racism and first love” (American Book Review 5, July/August, 1982: 11-12, available: www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/cervantes-lorna-dee/frances-whyatt-review-date-1982). Born in San Francisco of Mexican parents, Cervantes graduated San Jose State University in 1984. Supporting herself by writing and publishing, she eventually formed her own press, Mango publications, designed to promote Chicano and Chicana writers seeking to find a cultural and political identity for themselves balanced by the demands of their ars poetica. Currently, she teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal.

Cervantes’s work exemplifies the Chicano concerns with dual identity, the struggle between Spanish and English, and ethnic prejudice, but also the richness of ancestral heritage, especially evident in ambivalent images of Nature (symbols of energies that can be both loving and menacing). More particular is her focus on Chicana women, who face the double prejudice of sex and race inside and outside their community. Cervantes castigates machismo and celebrates strong cultural family bonds that feature powerful, nurturing images of women through generations. As she herself says in a Texas Observer interview (Summer 2006), “I’m a home girl, not a hoper. I don’t hope or wish for anything. I do. And I do believe. I believe there are forces and the forces of elements we can not know, not as a human being. I believe in history. And in the force of truth. I believe in the power of language—to do; to make belief; the power of hope.” While her themes are strongly Chicana, her confessional style reminds one of Robert Lowell, and her casual, direct narrative style bespeaks the influence of the Beats. She is the recipient of two fellowship grants for poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship. Emplumada won the American Book Award in 1981; From the Cables of Genocide won the Paterson Prize for Poetry and the Latino Award (http://college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/contemporary/cervantes_lo.html; www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/cervantes-lorna-dee; www.learner.org/amerpass/unit15/authors-3.html).