FIRE: Poems Against Pandemic by Lorna Dee Cervantes
Coming Fall 2026
 
 
In FIRE: Poems Against Pandemic, Lorna Dee Cervantes delivers a searing, resilient collection born from the dark, uncertain days of early 2020. Sparked by a near-fatal battle with COVID-19 following an encounter on a Seattle bus, Cervantes transforms illness and isolation into an urgent pledge of allegiance to the Earth and human survival. Published by El Martillo Press, the collection spans five rich sections that bridge personal trauma, grief, Indigenous heritage, and social justice.
 
Cervantes’s verse moves seamlessly between English and Spanish, honoring her grandmother’s lineage while confronting environmental destruction, systemic injustice, and mortality. Through vivid imagery—flaming forests, ocean tides, and ancestral memory—the poems function as both elegy and battle cry. Ultimately, FIRE is an unyielding testament to endurance, proving that even amidst global crisis, poetry remains a vital catalyst for healing, truth, and spiritual reclamation.
 
 
Born in San Francisco, raised in San José, Barrio Horseshoe, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a self-taught activist by 15, taught herself how to run her own printing press and was Founding Editor/Publisher of MANGO Publications at 20, and author of the American Book Award winning EMPLUMADA at 24. A XícanIndX poet (Chumash/Purépecha), Cervantes (PhD/ABD, History of Consciousness) was a Professor of English for 20 years at the University of Colorado, Boulder, serving as Director of Creative Writing. Cervantes has held faculty positions at the University of Houston, the University of California, Berkeley, where she has served as a UC Regents Lecturer in the English department, and as a Visiting Writer at Yale, Vassar, and others.  Awarded 2 NEA Fellowships, 2 Pushcart Prizes, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, state arts grants, and numerous awards for 6 books of poetry including her recent, April on Olympia, Cervantes has presented her poetry at 100s of campuses, venues and countries over the past 50 years. Her poems have appeared in 100s of anthologies and publications (Norton, Heath, Penguin, Poetry). Her newest, FIRE: Poems Against Pandemic, is forthcoming from El Martillo Press (2026).