Lorna Dee Cervantes

Donna Alexander (University College Cork)

Ed. by Cara Levey, University College Cork, Nuala Finnegan, University College Cork
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.7: Chicano/Latino Writing and Culture of the United States.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Nuala Finnegan (University College Cork), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Lori Oxford (Western Carolina University)

Dates

Born 6 Aug 1954

Places

Born in United States
Active in Mexico; United States

Cultural Identities

Chicano/a American

Activities

Primary

Poet

Resources

Cervantes' Works

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Lorna Dee Cervantes is a Chicana, Native American (Chumash), feminist, activist poet based in North America. Active as a poet and publisher since the early 1970s, Cervantes was born in San Francisco on the 6th of August 1954 and raised in San Jose by her mother and grandmother alongside her brother, Stephen Cervantes. Their home was located in a working class barrio called “Horseshoe” on Bird Avenue, a street later commemorated as the title of a poem and a subsection of her third collection of poetry,

Drive: The First Quartet

. The freeways that snaked across, over and above their home are the focal point of a series of poems in her first collection of poems in

Emplumada

(1981) These are referred to as “the freeway poems” by Cervantes scholars such as Raul H. Villa, who views these…

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3155 words

Citation: Alexander, Donna. "Lorna Dee Cervantes". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 July 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13455, accessed 23 November 2024.]