Cherríe Moraga

Cherríe L. Moraga
Born	September 25, 1952 Whittier, California
Occupation	playwright, activist
Nationality	USA
Subjects	feminism, Chicana
Notable work(s)	This Bridge Called My Back, Heroes and Saints
Notable award(s)	Critics' Circle; PEN West; American Book Award

Cherríe L. Moraga (born September 25, 1952) is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright.

Biography

Moraga was born in Whittier, California. She earned her Bachelor's degree from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, California, and her Master's from San Francisco State University in 1980. Of both Anglo and Mexican American heritage, her writing focuses on her experiences as a Chicana lesbian.

Moraga has taught courses in dramatic arts and writing at various universities across the United States and is currently an artist in residence at Stanford University. Her play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, performed at the Brava Theatre Company of San Francisco in May, 1996, won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Fund for New American Plays Award. Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Moraga started Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first publisher dedicated to the writing of women of color in the United States.

She is perhaps best known for co-editing, with Gloria Anzaldúa, the anthology of feminist thought This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Along with Ana Castillo and Norma Alarcon, she adapted this anthology into the Spanish-language Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos. Writings in the anthology, along with works by other prominent feminists of color, call for a greater prominence within feminism for race-related subjectivities, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism or Third World Feminism in the USA. Her first sole-authored book, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983), a combination of autobiographically modulated prose and poetry, is also an influential critical work among Chicana feminists and other feminists of color, and among scholars working in Chicano Studies.

Cherrie Moraga was named a 2007 USA Rockefeller Fellow and granted $50,000 by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists. She won a Creative Work Fund Award in 2008, and the Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwriting in 2009.

She published A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010, in 2011. Her play New Fire: To Put Things Right Again had its world premiere January 11–29, 2012, in San Francisco, California.

Selected bibliography

• A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000-2010 (2011). Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-4977-9
• Watsonville: Some Place Not Here; Circle in the dirt: el pueblo de East Palo Alto (2002). Albuquerque: West End Press. ISBN 0-9705344-5-0.
• The Hungry Woman (2001). Albuquerque: West End Press. ISBN 0-9705344-0-X
• Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (1997) Ithaca: Firebrand Books. ISBN 1-56341-093-1.
• "Art in America Con Acento" (1994). Anthologized in Women Writing Resistance: essays on Latin America and the Caribbean (2003). Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-708-5.
• Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (1994). Albuquerque: West End Press. ISBN 0-931122-74-0.
• The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry (1993). Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-467-1
• The Sexuality of Latinas (co-editor, 1993). Berkeley: Third Woman Press. ISBN 0-943219-00-0.
• Shadow of a Man (1992)
• Giving Up the Ghost: Teatro in Two Acts (1986). Los Angeles: West End Press. ISBN 0-931122-43-0.
• Cuentos: Stories By Latinas (co-editor, 1983). New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. ISBN 0-913175-01-3.
• Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983). Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-195-8.
• This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (co-editor, 1981). Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press. ISBN 0-943219-22-1
• Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos (co-editor, 1988). San Francisco: ism press. ISBN 978-0-910383-19-6.

Selected critical works on Cherríe Moraga

• Alarcón, Norma. “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology. Eds. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991. 28-39.
• Allatson, Paul. “‘I May Create a Monster’: Cherríe Moraga’s Hybrid Denial.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies 11-12 (1999/2000): 103-121.
• Allatson, Paul. “Cherríe Moraga.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Vol. 3: 1520-23.
• Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
• Ikas, Karin Rosa. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002.
• Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. “Cherríe Moraga.” Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Ed. David William Foster. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. 254-62.
• Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Cherríe Moraga.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 82: Chicano Writers First Series. Eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley. Detroit: Gale/Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1989. 165-77.
• Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “De-constructing the Lesbian Body: Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Ana Barale and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 595-603.
• Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Awards

• National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Scholars Award, 2001.
• David R. Kessler Award. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York. (In honor of contributions to the field of Queer Studies), 2000.
• The First Annual Cara Award. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center/ Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana/Chicano Studies, 1999.
• The Fund for New American Plays Award, a project of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 1995 and 1991.
• Lifetime Achievement Award, Ellas in Acción, San Francisco, 1995.
• Lesbian Rights Award, Southern California Women for Understanding ("for Outstanding Contributions in Lesbian Literature and for Service to the Lesbian Community"), 1991.
• The National Endowment for the Arts Theater Playwrights' Fellowship, 1993.
• The PEN West Literary Award for Drama, 1993.
• The (Bay Area Theatre?)^{[citation needed]} Critics' Circle Award for Best Original Script, 1992 (Heroes and Saints).
• The Will Glickman Playwriting Award, 1992.
• The Drama-logue Award for Playwriting, 1992.
• The Outlook Foundation, Literary Award, 1991.
• The California Arts Council Artists in Community Residency Award, 1991-2 /1993-5.
• The American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1986.
• The Creative Arts Public Service (CAPS) Grant for Poetry, New York State, 1983.
• The Mac Dowell Colony Fellowship for Poetry, New Hampshire, 1982.

See also

• Black feminism
• Chicana feminism
• Third-world feminism
• List of Mexican American writers
• List of women writers

External links

• Official site
• Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press, edited by Robin Bernstein) includes Moraga's essay, "And Frida Looks Back: The Art of Latina/o Queer Heroics."
• Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos (co-editor, 1988). San Francisco: ism press. ISBN 978-0-910383-19-6 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-910383-20-2 (hardcover)