The poetry of Latina women in the United States incorporates a great variety of voices that speak in a great diversity of registers on crucial themes such as identity, border, memory, and exile, to mention just a few of the more important concerns that their poetry presents. The forerunners included: Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ana Castillo, Lucha Corpi, Angela de Hoyos, Pat Mora, Alma Villanueva, and Bernice Zamora. During the 1970s and 1980s, these Chicana writers created new poetic spaces that integrated ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and language in shaping what we know today as Latina poetry. Though previously only women poets who wrote in English had been considered Latina poets, today this concept has expanded to include those Latin American women poets who reside in the US, write primarily in Spanish and have their work translated into English. As Bryce Milligan has pointed out, Latina writers of non-Mexican heritage began to publish in the US – women with roots in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and South and Central America – each bringing with them elements of their own national literary traditions.

Faced with the impossibility of including here the numerous representatives that stand out today in the Latina literary scene of the US, I am limited by cultural affinity and space to present a concise overview of Latina Caribbean women poets, highlighting in particular the work of Sandra María Esteves and Judith Ortiz Cofer (Nuyorican/Puerto Rican-American poetry), Magali Alabau and Carolina Hospital (Cuban-American poetry), and Julia Alvarez (Dominican- American poetry). The seventeen entries included in this chapter representpoets I have read or seen perform in readings and literary gatherings. These are poets who come from different cultural, literary, and personal backgrounds, who write in English, and Spanish, and who examine and articulate issues of cultural identity and gender.