Celeste Guzman Mendoza is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in Borderlands, Poet Lore, Salamander, and other journals as well as numerous anthologies, and a cofounder of CantoMundo, a master workshop for Latino and Latina poets. She is also a playwright whose first production, Burnt Sienna, won the American College Theater Festival's Ten Minute Play Award. She is currently the associate director of development at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of Texas-Austin. She lives in Austin, Texas.