Lorna dee cervantes biography definition

At age 5, Cervantes's parents divorced and she moved with her mother and brother, Stephen Cervantes to her grandmother's house in downtown San Jose. Cervantes's early childhood was immersed in poverty. After graduation, Cervantes enrolled in San Jose Community College due to her guidance counselor's advice, despite her dreams of attending Yale University. She graduated with very high honors with an AS in Liberal Arts and an emphasis in Comparative Literature. 

Cervantes started writing poetry at age 8 as an outlet to a compromising home situation and because she simply loved to write. While traveling with her musician brother to Mexico City in , she performed for the first time to the Theater of the People of San Jose at the Quinto Festival de los Teatros Chicanos with the reading of "Refugee Ship." Her poem and presentation appeared in a Mexican newspaper, along with other journals and reviews. 

&#;I can&#;t say there was any time in my life when poetry wasn&#;t the center of my life.&#; -Lorna Dee Cervantes in an interview with Fran Lozano

In , Cervantes produced her own first collection of poems entitled Emplumada, which won the American Book Award a mere year later. "Emplumada" translates to "pen flourish" and "feathered," symbolizing poetry's concern with beauty and elegance to Cervantes's own obsession with langua

for Indrek‍

I

In Estonia, Indrek is taking his children
to the Dollar Market to look at bananas.
He wants them to know about the presence of fruit,
about globes of light tart to the tongue, about the
twang of tangelos, the cloth of persimmons,
the dull little mons of kiwi. There is not a chance
for a taste where rubles are scarce and dollars, harder.
Even beef is doled out welfare-thin on Saturday’s platter.
They light the few candles not reserved for the dead,
and try not to think of the small bites of the coming winter,
irradiated fields or the diminished catch in the fisherman’s
net. They tell of bananas yellow as daffodils. And mango—
which tastes as if the whole world came out from her womb.


II

Colombia, , bananas rot in the fields.
A strip of lost villages between railyard
and cemetery. The United Fruit Company
train, a yellow painted slug, eats
up the swamps and jungle. Campesinos
replace Indians who are a dream and a rubble
of bloody stones hacked into coffins: malaria,
tuberculosis, cholera, machetes of the jefes.
They become like the empty carts that shatter
the landscape. Their hands, no longer pulling green
teats from the trees, now twist into death, into silence
and obedience. They wait in Aracataca, poised
as statues between hemispheres. They would rather
be tilling their plots for black beans. They would
rather grow wings and rise as pericos—parrots, poets,
clowns—a word which means all this, pericos, those
messengers from Mictlán, the underworld, where ancestors
of the slain arise with the vengeance of Tláloc. A stench
permeates the wind as bananas, black on the stumps, char
into odor. The murdered Mestizos have long been cleared
and begin their new duties as fertilizer for the plantations.
Feathers fall over the newly spaded soil: turquoise,
scarlet, azure, quetzal, and yellow litters
the graves with the gold claws of bananas.


III

Dear I,
The 3′×6′ boxes in front of the hippie
market in Boulder are radiant with

Nationality: American. Born:San Francisco, 6 August Education:San Jose State University, California, B.A. ; University of California, Santa Cruz, – Career: Instructor of creative writing, University of Colorado, Boulder. Founder, Mango Publications, and editor, Mango literary review; founder and editor, Red Dirt magazine. Has been active in the American Indian and Chicano movements since the s. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts grant, , ; American Book award, , for Emplumada; Hudson D. Walker fellowship, Fine Arts Work Center, Province-town; Pushcart prize. Address: Department of English, University of Colorado, Box , Boulder, Colorado –, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Emplumada. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh Press,

From the Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger. Houston, Arte Publico Press,

Recording: An Evening of Chicano Poetry, Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature,

Critical Studies: "Soothing Restless Serpents: The Dreaded Creation and Other Inspirations in Chicana Poetry" by Tey Diana Rebolledo, in Third Woman (Berkeley, California), 2(1), ; "Notes toward a New Multicultural Criticism: Three Works by Women of Color" by John F. Crawford, in A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero, Athens, University of Georgia Press, ; "Chicana Literature from a Chicana Feminist Perspective" by Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, in Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, edited by Maria Herrera-Sobek and Helena Maria Viramontes, Houston, Arte Publico, ; "Lorna Dee Cervantes's Dialogic Imagination," in Annales du Centre de Recherches sur l'Amerique Anglophone (Cedex, France), 18, , and "Bilingualism and Dialogism: Another Reading of Lorna Dee Cervantes's Poetry," in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, edited by Alfred Arteaga, Durham, Nor

Biography: Lorna Dee Cervantes ( )

Lorna Cervantes was born in in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, to a family of Mexican ancestry. After graduation from San Jose's Lincoln High School, she was "discovered" during a reading of her poetry at the Quinto Festival de los Teatros Chicanos in Mexico City in Later that year she purchased an offset printing press and began to publish the works of other Chicano and Hispanic writers through her company, Mango Publications. She earned a BA from California State University at San Jose and has done graduate work in the doctoral program in history and aesthetics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Cervantes's poems, with Chicana perspectives and multicultural implications, look at the meaning of color and class in modern American life. Emplumada (), which met with wide critical praise, paints the lives of Hispanic men and women whose hardships and deprivations contrast sharply with a promised, but denied, American dream. The author appears in the series of poems as an individual on the cusp between the imagery of ancient Hispanic tradition and a newly-formed identity in a landscape of many cultures. The author's work has been noted for its lush and colorful imagery and appreciation for the rhythm and cadence of language.

Works by Cervantes include Emplumada (; American Book Award) and From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (). She is co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in , and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award in

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