Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in 1954. She is the author of From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger and Emplumada (1981), which won an American Book Award. She is also co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal, and her work has been included in many anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets, and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties. In 1995 she received a Lila Wallace- Reader's Digest Writers' Award. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Cervantes' first collection is an extremely mature book. The poems are lyrical and well crafted; images recur and build upon one another as the book progresses. Personal but never confessional, she holds emotion in check.