Lourdes Figueroa is an oral poet. Her poems are a dialogue of her lived experience when her family worked in el azad? n in Yolo County. The words el azad? n are used by the ones who work in the fields - the work of tilling the soil under the blistering sun. She is the author of the chapbooks yolotl and Ruidos = To Learn Speak, completed during her Alley Cat Books Residency. She received her MFA in Poetry at the University of San Francisco. She is a recipient of the 2021 Nomadic Press Literary Award in Poetry selected by emeritus poet Laureate Kim Shuck.