Lorna Dee Cervantes (b. August 6, 1954, in San Francisco, California) is an award-winning Chicana-Native American poet who is considered one of the major Chicana poets of the past 40 years. She has been described by Alurista, Mexico’s premier poet, as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in 1954 in California. She grew up in San Jose, speaking English exclusively. This was strictly enforced by her parents, who allowed only English to be spoken at home by her and her brother. This was to avoid the racism and genocide that was occurring in her community at that time. Lorna Dee Cervantes is currently a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She considers herself "a Chicana writer, a feminist writer, a political writer" (Cervantes). Although her literary works are held in high esteem, she often lacks self-confidence concerning her writing. Her two collections of poetry, Emplumada and From the Cable of Genocide, are the only published works exclusively written by Cervantes. She explains that this is due to the fact that she has "never been a writer who sends out a lot of manuscripts and a lot of poems...because of the terror of rejection" (Cervantes). (via Wikipedia)