Lorna Dee Cervantes

A fifth-generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash/Purépecha) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes was born on August 6, 1954, in San Francisco, and raised in San Jose, California. She earned a BA in creative arts from San Jose State University and a PhD in the history of consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Cervantes is the author of several poetry collections, including Sueño: New Poems (Wings Press, 2013); Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (Wings Press, 2011); From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público Press, 1991); and Emplumada (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), which won an American Book Award. Her work has been published in hundreds of anthologies, including FIRE: Poems Against Pandemic (El Martillo Press, 2026); Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin, 1994), edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan; No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets (Harper Perennial, 1993), edited by Florence Howe; and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (David R. Godine, 1992), edited by Ray González. 

Cervantes has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.

At age twenty, Cervantes became the founding editor and publisher of MANGO Publications. She is currently a coeditor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal. Cervantes has held faculty positions at Yale University, Vassar College, University of Houston, University of Colorado Boulder, where she taught for twenty years and served as the director of the creative writing program, and University of California, Berkeley, where she has served as a UC Regents Lecturer in the English department since 2011.