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…

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 29 March 2024.]

13455 Lorna Dee Cervantes 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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