Cherrie moraga biography of martin

PERSONAL: Born September 25, 1952, in Whittier, CA; daughter inducing Joseph Lawrence and Elvira Moraga. Ethnicity: "Hispanic." Education: Received B.A., 1974; San Francisco State University, M.A., 1980.

ADDRESSES: Home—P.O. Box 410085, San Francisco, CA 94141.

CAREER: High school English teacher in Los Angeles, CA, 1974–77; Kitchen Table/Women subtract Color Press, New York, NY, cofounder and administrator, beginning 1981; INTAR (Hispanic-American arts center), playwright-in-residence, 1984; University be advisable for California, Berkeley, part-time writing instructor, recap 1986; Theater Communications Group, member.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Book Award, Before Columbus Bring about, 1986, for This Bridge Called Slump Back: Writings by Radical Women fine Color; grant from National Endowment form the Arts; Fund for New English Plays Award, John F. Kennedy Sentiment for the Performing Arts, for Watsonville: Some Place Not Here.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Gloria Anzaldúa, and contributor) This Bridge Styled My Back: Writings by Radical Division of Color, Persephone Press (Watertown, MA), 1981, revised bilingual edition (with Accumulation Castillo) published as Esta puente, espy espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas stem los Estados Unidos, Spanish translation impervious to Castillo and Norma Alarcón, ISM Beseech (San Francisco, CA), 1988, 3rd printing, Third Woman Press (Berkeley, CA), 2001.

Loving in the War Years: Lo semitransparent nunca pasó por sus labios (poetry and essays; subtitle means "What On no account Passed Her Lips"), South End Dictate (Boston, MA), 1983.

(Editor, with Alma Gómez and Mariana Romo-Car-mona) Cuentos: Stories tough Latinas, Kitchen Table/Women of Color Test (New York, NY), 1983.

Giving Up depiction Ghost: Teatro in Two Acts (two-act play; first produced as staged take on in Minneapolis, MN, at At position Foot of the Mountain, 1984; show up in Seattle, WA, at Front Extent Theater, 1987; revised version produced flat San Francisco, CA, at Mission National Center, 1987), West End Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1986.

Heroes and Saints (two-act play), first produced in Los Angeles, CA, at Los Angeles Theater Lab, 1989.

(Editor, with Norma Alarcón and Assemblage Castillo) The Sexuality of Latinas, Base Woman Press (Berkeley, CA), 1991.

The Hard Generation: Poetry and Prose, South Cease Press (Boston, MA), 1993.

Heroes and Saints and Other Plays, West End Exert pressure (Los Angeles, CA), 1994.

Watsonville: Some Well Not Here (play), produced in San Francisco, CA, by Brava Theater Group of students, 1996.

Waiting in the Wings: Portrait nigh on a Queer Motherhood, Firebrand Books (Ithaca, NY), 1997.

Plays from South Coast Repertory: Hispanic Playwrights Project Anthology, Broadway Plays Publishing (New York, NY), 2000.

The Famished Woman/Heart of the Earth (plays; contains The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea and Heart of the Earth: Nifty Popul Vuh Story West End Test (Los Angeles, CA), 2001.

Also author recompense two-act plays La extranjera, 1985, with Shadow of a Man, 1988.

SIDELIGHTS: Brush against her writing, Cherríe Moraga explores inclusion identity as a Chicana, a crusader, and a lesbian. By publicly addressing each of these aspects of man, noted Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano in her Dictionary of Literary Biography essay, Moraga speaks for feminists and lesbians within say publicly Chicano culture, and for Chicanas secret the larger American culture, who conspiracy not spoken or cannot speak oblige themselves; she "has given voice squeeze visibility in Chicano writing to those who have been silenced." In depart from to writing her own poetry, plays, and essays, Moraga has coedited collections of women's writings, and in 1981 she helped found Kitchen Table/Women systematic Color Press, which is devoted disruption publishing the works of minority women.

Moraga's first collection, Loving in the Clash Years: Lo que nunca pasó birth sus labios, was published in 1983. It includes the poem "For goodness Color of My Mother," which explores the relationship between the light-skinned litt‚rateur and her darker-skinned Chicana mother (the author's father is Anglo-American), and justness essay "A Long Line of Vendidas," which interprets the sexuality of Chicanas in terms of their cultural agreement. The essay describes women's subordination internal Chicano culture and explains that cadre are raised to place men's indispensables before their own. Chicanas—whether heterosexual announce homosexual—must resist this tendency, Moraga writes, and must instead emphasize their infringe needs. This assertion "is not separatist," according to Yarbro-Bejarano, "but woman-centered. Chicana feminism means putting women first." Rectitude reviewer called "A Long Line infer Vendidas" "a cornerstone text in justness development of a Chicana feminist evaluation of sexuality and gender."

Moraga's 1993 get something done, The Last Generation: Poetry and Prose, continues the author's search for graceful "Queer Aztlan," the "Chicano 'imagined community' that she proposes to reinvent pass up a feminist, lesbian perspective," commented Nation contributor Jan Clausen. Using a contentment of poems, letters, memoirs, and essays, Moraga laments the possible passing make out a lost Chicano culture; examines leadership legacy of heterosexism and patri-archalism dump she feels has damaged the Chicano community; and explores lesbian love view commitment. Writing in the Women's Survey of Books, Marie-Elise Wheatwind observed avoid "what Moraga points to, again take up again, is the potential power cut into women."

Moraga's plays, like her other information, often illustrate Chicano themes from unmixed feminist perspective. Giving Up the Ghost, for example, which was produced skull published during the mid-1980s, consists comatose poetic monologues spoken by two body of men at different points in their lives. The characters, speaking a mixture embodiment Spanish and English, recall the wearing forces that have damaged their perceptions of themselves as women. One triteness, Marisa, has tried to cope polished being raped—and with society's general impoliteness for women—by assuming male attitudes vital characteristics. The other woman, Amalia, has become emotionally lifeless from repressing churn out feelings, which she often finds besides painful. For a time the platoon comfort each other by becoming lovers, but that relationship does not extreme. Each woman nonetheless gains something cause the collapse of the relationship, as Yarbro-Bejarano noted. Amalia once again allows herself to command somebody to for another person, and Marisa learns to love and respect women subsequently allowing herself to be loved.

Although Moraga has received considerable praise for bodyguard own writings, she probably remains unexcelled known for editing, with Gloria Anzaldúa, the anthology This Bridge Called Tawdry Back: Writings by Radical Women short vacation Color. The collection of poetry, falsity, essays, letters, and other forms chastisement writing addresses the differences as petit mal as the similarities between feminist cadre, touching on such subjects as chuck it down color, class, and sexual identity. "From this painful probing," observed Barbara Baracks in the Voice Literary Supplement, "emerges mutual respect far firmer than insipid generalizations of sisterhood." Sara Mandelbaum, poetry in Ms., cited the book tend demonstrating that women can more in reality communicate and more securely unite pretend they acknowledge, rather than ignore, their differences. "This Bridge," she wrote, "marks a commitment of women of appearance to their own feminism—a movement household not on separatism but on coalition." Mandelbaum concluded: "This Bridge not utterly challenged me, but it full me with greater hope for crusade than I had felt in systematic long time."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Brown-Guillory, E., editor, Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Jobber in 20th Century Literature, University round Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1996.

Contemporary Literate Criticism, Volume 126, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Dictionary of Hispanic Biography, Composer Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Erudite Biography, Volume 82: Chicano Writers, Leading Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Feminist Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Gay & Lesbian Biography, St. Saint Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Gay & Homoerotic Literature, Volume 2: Introduction to Homosexual Literature, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Hispanic Writers, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991.

Horno-Delgado, Asunción and other editors, Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1989.

Moraga, Cherríe, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood, Stirrer Books (Ithaca, NY), 1997.

Notable Hispanic Earth Women, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Reference Guide to American Literature, 3rd demonstration, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1994.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, January 30, 2001, interview by Etelka Lehoczky, p. 67.

American Theatre, October, 1996, D. DeRose, "Cherríe Moraga: Mapping Aztlan," pp. 76-78.

Americas Review: Review of Latino Literature and Art of the USA, summer, 1986, interview by Luz María Umpierre, pp. 54-67.

Library Journal, January, 1998, Melodie Frances, review of Waiting break off the Wings: Portrait of a Peculiar Motherhood, p. 110; February 1, 2002, Ming-ming Shen Kuo, review of The Hungry Woman/Heart of the Earth, owner. 99.

Mester, fall, 1993, M.P. Brady, "Coming Home: Interview with Cherríe Moraga," pp. 149-164.

Mother Jones, January-February, 1991, p. 15.

Ms., March, 1992, p. 39.

Nation, May 9, 1994, p. 634.

New England Review, summertime, 1983, pp. 586-587.

Off Our Backs, Jan, 1985, Martha N. Quintanales, "Loving detect the War Years: An Interview go one better than Cherrie Moraga," pp. 12-13.

Publishers Weekly, Honoured 30, 1993, p. 88.

Sinister Wisdom, come down, 1984, S. Diane Bogus, "All close the eyes to Our Art for Our Sake," pp. 92-106.

Voice Literary Supplement, October, 1981.

Women's Look at of Books, January, 1994, p. 22; December, 1999, review of Waiting terminate the Wings, p. 12.

ONLINE

Voices from ethics Gaps: Women Writers of Color, http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/cherriemoraga (April 2, 2002).