Norma E. Cantú currently serves as Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska,Lincoln. She is the editor of a book series, Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition, at Texas A&M University Press and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Author of the award-winning Canícula Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, and co-editor of Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, she has just finished a novel, Cabañuelas. She is currently working on another novel tentatively titled Champú, or Hair Matters. She is also working on an ethnography, forthcoming from the Texas A&M University Press, a study of the Matachines de la Santa Cruz, a religious dance tradition in Laredo. Her areas of Specialization are Literary Criticism, Folklore, Women's Studies, Border Studies, Chicano Literature, 20th Century American Literature.