Caulfield, Carlota (Havana, Cuba 1953-present). A Cuban poet who lives and works in Oakland, California. She is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies and a member of Mills College Women's Studies Advisory Council. In 1981 she left her native country. Since then she has resided in Zurich, Switzerland, and in different American cities: New York, New Orleans, San Francisco and Oakland. Caulfield defines herself as a poet, and a computer adventurer who has created a multimedia book of "hyperpoetry" (XXXIX Steps). In Cuba she was a publisher for the Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, and was in charge of editions of 18th century French political and literary figures Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-1794), and 19th century Cuban writer José Antonio Saco. However, her literary career as a poet, scholar and translator only began after she left Cuba. Since 1984 she has published several books of poetry in the United States, Italy and Spain. As a poet, she has been recognized in Puerto Rico (Honorable Mention in "Mairena" International Poetry Prize); Italy ("Ultimo Novecento,"1988; "Ricardo-Marchi-Torre di Calafuria," 1995); Spain (Honorable Mention in the Spain-USA poetry prize "Federico Garca Lorca," 1994) and Mexico (Honorable Mention in "Premio Plural," 1993). The concept that best defines Caulfield's poetic is multiplicity. From her first book (Fanaim, 1984) to the most recent one (Libro de los XXXIX Escalones/Book of the XXXIX Steps), she has been constructing her own poetic by incorporating to her writing a vast collection of female voices she considers her precursors. Her themes include eroticism, carnality, sensuality, myths, legends, histories, and paintings from different periods and cultures. In this sense, she cannot be considered a typical Latino female poet whose work is mostly focused on the loss of motherland, the acquisition of a Cuban American ethnicity, or the challenges of social and gender discrimination. Also, some male critics have pointed out that she does not fit the stereotypical pattern attributed to feminist poets: her poetry revives the feminine tradition through different historical, national and literary masks. However, scholars who study Cuban poetry in exile have contested this multiplicity. They argue that her construction of referential labyrinths seems to be eccentric and that her Cuban poetic voice has been emptied because of its excessive intertextuality. On the other hand, Caulfield has explained that, like herself, her readers have many voices: friends, students of Latin American literature in the United States, the American audience who reads English, Italian readers, Spaniards. Female critics of Caulfield's works have noted that there is a review of History made from a feminist standpoint. They elaborate that while men take femininity as a source of poetical enigma, the female poet exalts, precisely, the enigma as a positive aspect of her totality. Rather than accepting the notion of the "universal feminine," they state that Caulfield's numerous poetic voice express what Helen Cixous labels as the imagination of women, those who prefer to explore possible languages instead of describing the existing language.