A Chicana, queer, feminist theorist, poet, and cultural visionary, Gloria Anzaldúa was born in the Río Grande Valley of South Texas in 1942. Raised in a Spanish-speaking, working-class family, she experienced from an early age the intersections of race, gender, language, and class that would come to define her life's work. She began writing at age five and never stopped—despite being discouraged from speaking Spanish and punished for speaking Chicano dialects in school. Her formal studies in English and education eventually led her to explore radical pedagogy, spirituality, and cultural theory.

Her work lives between—between lands, between tongues, between genders and gods. She wrote with blood, with dreams, with tongues split and sutured. To read her is to feel the earth shift under your feet and realise that the crack is a womb, not a wound.