Roberta Fernández
Roberta Fernández | |
---|---|
Occupation | novelist |
Nationality | US |
Period | 1990– |
Genre | composite novel, short story cycle |
Notable works | Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories |
Notable awards | Multicultural Publisher's Exchange, Best Fiction (1991) Texas Institute of Letters |
Literature portal |
Roberta Fernández is a Tejana novelist, scholar, critic and arts advocate. She is known for her novel Intaglio and for her work editing several award-winning women writers. She was a professor in Romance Languages & Literatures and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia.[1]
Biography
Early life and education
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Fernández is a fifth-generation tejana from Laredo, Texas. She received her B.A. and an M.A. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages & Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, "Towards a Contextualization of José Carlos Mariátegui’s Concept of Literary and Cultural Nationalism,"[1] examined the role of José Carlos Mariátegui in the early 20th century Peruvian cultural wars.
Fernandez held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT, Austin; she received a Rockefeller Fellowship from the Womanist Consortium of the Institute of African American Studies at UGA to study Chicana literary feminism and nationalism.[1] She received a second Rockefeller Fellowship from the CRIM [Centro Regional de Investigacion Multidisciplinarias], a research center in Cuernavaca associated with the National University of Mexico.[citation needed] The seminar topic for 2005 was "The Empowerment of Women." Her own topic dealt with "The Role Played by Community-Based Organizations in the Transculturation Process & Empowerment of Mexican Women Recently Arrived in Georgia."[citation needed]
Art advocacy
- Assistant to the Director, Mexican Museum in San Francisco
- Director, Bilingual Arts Program, Oakland Unified School District
- Founder, Prisma: A Multicultural, Multilingual Women's Literary Review (1979–1982) at Mills College
- Directed two major conferences: "The Cultural Roots of Chicana Literature, 1780-1980" (Mills College and Aztlán Cultural, 1981; see here for photo of the exhibit's poster) and "Latinos in the United States: Cultural Roots and Diversity" (Brown University and Casa Puerto Rico, 1985).
Editorial and curatorial work
- Editor, Arte Público Press, from 1990-1994. Several of the writers whose manuscripts she edited received national awards for these works.
- Curator, "Twenty-Five Years of Hispanic Literature of the United States, 1965-1990" (traveling exhibit), sponsored by the Texas Humanities Resource Center.
Published works
- Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories (1990)
- Fronterizas: Una novela en seis cuentos (the author's own re-write into Spanish of Intaglio) (2002)
- In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, ed. (1994; anthology)
- Fiesta, Fe y Cultura: Religious Celebrations of the Mexican Community of Detroit, [Roberta Fernandez, Spanish editor and translator], Laurie Sommers, ed. (1995)
- Twenty-five Years of Hispanic Literature in the United States, (a catalogue of a library exhibit of the same name) at the Main Library of the U of Houston, November 2, 1992 – January 14, 1993).
- Some of her short fiction and essays have appeared in Riding Low in the Streets of Gold, Judith Ortiz Cofer, ed.; Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, Nicolas Kanellos, ed.; American 24-Karet Gold: Classic American Short Stories, Yvonne Colliud Sisko, ed.; Breve: Actualite de la Nouvelle (Paris), Martine Couderc, ed. & trans.; Barrios and Borderlands: Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, Denis Lynn Daly Heyck, ed.; Mascaras: Latina Writers on Their Own Work, Lucha Corpi, ed.; The Stories We Have Kept Secret, Carol Bruchac, ed.;The Massachusetts Review (Spring 1983); Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, Gomez, Moraga, Romo-Carmona, eds., and many more national and international publications.
- Some of her scholarly articles have appeared in as The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, Frances Aparicio & Suzanne Bost, eds. (2012); The Flannery O'Connor Review (Fall, 2009); Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature, Emmanuel Nelson, gen. ed. (2006); 'Abriendo Caminos in the Brotherland: Chicana Feminism in El Grito ' in Chicana Leadership: The Frontier Reader, Sue Armitage et. al, eds. (2002); 'La presencia de Jose Carlos Mariategui en el Repertorio Americano (Costa Rica, 1919-1959)' in Revista de Linguística y Filología de la Universidad de Costa Rica; Reconstructing American Literature, Paul Lauter (ed.); Women’s Studies and in other publications.
Literary criticism on Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories
- Akins, Adrienne Viola. “’Each of Us Tell It As We See It’: Memory and Story-Telling in Roberta Fernandez’s Intaglio” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 2010: 52 (1): 30-40.
- Gómez-Vega, Ibis. “La mujer como artista en Intaglio.” The Bilingual Review, 1993 Jan-April, 18 (1): 14-22.
- Jameson, Misty L. “Roberta Fernandez’s Intaglio as Short Story Cycle.” Lecture presented at the Aqui y Ahora Symposium on Latina/o Literature at the University of Georgia (Athens), November, 2001.
- Kelly, Margot. “A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre.” Ethnicity and the American Short Story (Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History and Culture). Julia Brown, Ed. New York: Routledge, 1997: 63-84.
- McCracken, Ellen. In chapter on “Remapping Religious Space” in New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Post-Modern Ethnicity. Tucson: U of Arizona Press, 1999.
- Muthyala, John Sermanth. “Roberta Fernández’s Intaglio: Border Crossings and Mestiza Feminism in the Border-Lands.” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines, 2000:30 (1); 92-110. (PDF On-line)
- Muthyala, John Sermanth. Reworlding America: Myth, History and Narrative. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. [Chapter 4 is on Intaglio and on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.]
Awards for creative writing
- Three-time DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest/MacDowell Fellow while a resident at the MacDowell Colony
- Multicultural Publisher's Exchange award, Best Fiction (1991), Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories
- Inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters (1991)
- [Finalist for the Schweitzer Fellowship in Creative Writing at SUNY Albany—Toni Morrison, judge, 1987]
- [Finalist for the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship at the U of New Mexico, 1986]
- [Finalist for the Dobie/Paisano Fellowship of the Graduate School at the U of Texas in Austin, 1983]
Scholarly awards
- Fulbright Senior Lecturer award: Department of English and American Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic (2006–2007)
- [Scholar-in-Residence (by invitation of the Athens-Clarke County Public Library): led five book discussions on Latino/a literature at four public libraries in Georgia through a pilot program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association, Oct 2001-June 2002]
- [Faculty Research Grant, Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia, Spring, 2001]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e Arte Público Press bio page, accessed 9 March 2008
- ^ UGA Institute for Women's Studies Newsletter (accessed March 2008)
Notes/Further reading
- Gómez-Vega, Ibis. "La mujer como artista en Intaglio." The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue, 1993 Jan-Apr; 18 (1): 14-22.
- Kelley, Margot. "A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre." Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Ed. Julia Brown. New York, NY: Garland; 1997. pp. 63–84.
- Muthyala, John Sumanth. "Roberta Fernández's Intaglio: Border Crossings and Mestiza Feminism in the Borderlands." Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Etudes Américaines, 2000; 30 (1): 92-110. (PDF online)
External links
- Texas Humanities Resource Center (scroll down), not part of Humanities Texas
- Texas Institute of Letters
- Use dmy dates from January 2011
- 20th-century American novelists
- American short story writers
- American writers of Mexican descent
- American academics of Mexican descent
- American feminists
- Living people
- University of Texas at Austin alumni
- University of California, Berkeley alumni
- Hispanic and Latino American novelists
- Chicana feminists
- American essayists
- American literary critics
- 21st-century American novelists
- Hispanic and Latino-American short story writers
- American women novelists
- 20th-century women writers
- 21st-century women writers