[1] She has published collections of poetry and has conducted literary programs at New York City Board of Education, the Caribbean Cultural Center, and El Museo del Barrio.
[3][4] Her mother was concerned early on with her upbringing in the challenging environment of their neighborhood of Hunts Point, and thus enrolled her in a primary Catholic boarding school in the Lower East Side, Holy Rosary Academy.
[4] While she did find lack of support during her initial time at Pratt, one Japanese professor who specialized in sculpture, Toshio Odate, encouraged her to look at how words could contribute to her work as a visual artist.
Esteves joined El Grupo, an artistic collective who performed with the intention of leading social change; this would serve as the foundation and core for the Nuyorican movement itself.
The themes that she frequently addresses are identity struggles—most notably her personally comprehension of her place as an Afro-Caribbean but also as challenges to her mentors and peers (“A Julia y a Mi” for Julia de Burgos, “3:00 AM Eulogy for a Small Time Poet” presumably for Miguel Piñero), parsing out feminism within the Latino culture, oppression of women, metapoems describing poetry as a tool to instill change, motherhood and birth, and mysticism and spiritualism.
Her second poetry collection, Tropical Rains: A Bilingual Downpour, was published in 1984 but did not see the wide success of Yerba Buena, potentially due to the fact that it was self-published.
Publications Selected Poems in Anthologies, Literary Journals and Web sites Productions Esteves received her first poetry fellowship in 1980 from New York State CAPS.