Toni Flores was an anthropologist with a special interest in folklore, folk art, and traditional life, particularly as experienced by women. Her poetry was often occasioned by her fieldwork, though in later years her poems turned increasingly inward. Flores's scholarly work was published widely in her lifetime and included research on humanistic anthropology, field poetry, ethnicity and gender, the birthing movement, ethnic cooking, Mexican folk artist Teodora Blanco, and nineteenth-century feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage. She was the influential poetry editor of Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly, and taught from 1971 until her death in 1997 at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she was treasured by generations of students