In summary, this is our collection. And to all who ruminate these pages: luz y mar. - Luz María Umpierre

I feel that self promotion of one's misfortunes for gain is highly deplorable and a treason to the self.

My first collection: Una puertorriqueña en Penna came out of those years and the racism I experienced while being a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College. Some of the poems are also a defense of my Puerto Rican culture and language. It is sad to say that the poems were not accepted by a Latino publishing house at the time because I did not write "like a woman." In other words, I was supposed to write about flowers, gardening and domestic chores. This first anthology was amplified to be the final book, En el país de las maravillas, which my dearest Chicana sister, Norma Alarcón, agreed to publish as the first book from her established press: Third Woman. Third Woman Press gave me a platform from which to publish without pressure from the establishment on thematics. They also published my next two books: ...Y otras desgracias and The Margarita Poems. The day I received a hand written note from Maya Angelou, stating that she had read The Margarita Poems and I should consider her another Margarita, was a private moment of recognition.

When I read, for the first time my collection The Margarita Poems (at rutgers university)...a young Latino male, as soon as I read my poem, "Immanence," stood up and left the room, only to go and see the Dean the next morning to ask him "How could the university have allowed an open Lesbian poem to be read within its confines?" The organizer of the conference, a remarkable white woman, had the perfect answer for the Dean: "The university is the place where one loses one's virginity and I guess that young man lost his yesterday."