[Publib] The Chicano Literary List

[Katie Knight]

Hey there everyone,

Here's what I was able to compile. It's pasted below this message (just
after my signature) for folks who are unable to receive attachments, so
please excuse the extreme length of this message.  I think that this list is
a good starting point for anyone interested in checking out Mexican and
Chicano lit, but it's certainly not comprehensive.  When possible, I added
information about the authors, especially about any literary awards that
they may have received (though I do realize that being the recipient of an
award does not necessarily mean that an author is amazing, and not all of
the amazing authors receive awards).  

Also, there are two South American authors who were recommended by some of
you, which I have included in this list, though you will want to delete
these authors if you decide to post this under the heading "Mexican and
Chicano Literature."  I left them in there because they are important
Hispanophone authors, but definitely not Mexican/Chicano.

Anyway, this looks like a pretty good beginning for my patron, and hopefully
for others, too.  Thanks to everyone who helped me with this.  And by all
means if I've made any egregious errors or omissions, please please let me
know.  

Best, 

-Katie


Katie Knight
Adult Services Librarian
Granville County Public Library System
Thornton Library
210 Main Street
Oxford, NC 27565

Phone: 919 693-1121
Fax: 919 693-2244

_________

Mexican and Chicano Literature

Alicia Gaspar de Alba (El Paso, Texas; Premio Aztlan Award)
Claribel Alegría (born to Nicaraguan and Salvadoran parents in Estelí,
Nicaragua; won the Cuban-sponsored 
Casa de las Américas prize in 1978 for Sobrevivo, writing is a reflection of
a literary current that gained 
momentum in Central America during the 1950s and 1960s known as "la
generacion comprometida")
Isabel Allende (Lima, Peru)
Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic; PEN Oakland Award)
Rudolfo A. Anaya (Pastura, New Mexico); Premio Quinto Sol literary award for
Bless Me, Ultima, 1970; PEN-
West Fiction Award, 1992, for Alburquerque.
Gloria Anzaldua (self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache
poet, writer, 
		and cultural theorist," was born to
sharecropper/field-worker parents in South Texas Rio Grande Valley;
Borderlands/La Frontera was selected by the Literary Journal as one of the
38 Best Books of 1987)
Homero Aridjis (Contepec, Michocan, Mexico; poetry and novels; twice the
recipient of a Guggenheim 
		Fellowship, has taught at Columbia University, New York
University, and Indiana University, has been Mexican ambassador to the
Netherlands and Switzerland, founder and president of the Group of 100 (an
international environmental organization of writers, artists, and
scientists), and is president of PEN International)
Aristeo Brito (Mexican-American; in 1990 the Bilingual Press won the
prestigious award for novel of 
the Western States Arts Federation for The Devil in Texas/El Diablo en
Tejas)
Nash Candelaria (born in Los Angeles, California; Not by the Sword received
an American Book 
Award in 1983 and was a finalist for the Western Writers of America's Best
Western Historical 
Novel award)
Ana Castillo (born and raised in Chicago, but spent most of her writing
career studying her Mestiza 
		heritage; American Book Award from the Before Columbus
Foundation for The Mixquiahuala Letters, a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains
and Plains Booksellers Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts in fiction and poetry)
Rosario Castellanos (Mexico City; one of Mexico's most important literary
voices in the last century)
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Mexican; she is best known as a major Baroque
literary figure of Mexico)
Sandra Cisneros (born in Chicago in 1954, to a Mexican father and a Chicana
mother; Woman Hollering Creek 
		(1991) won the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction of
1991, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf
Book Award, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and was selected as a
noteworthy book of the year by The New York Times and the American Library
Journal)
Denise Chavez (Las Cruces, New Mexico; The Last of the Menu Girls, for which
she won the Puerto del Sol 
		Fiction Award and Face of an Angel (1994) received much
critical acclaim, received the American Book Award, the Premio Axtlan, and
Mesilla Valley Author of the Year Award) 
Paulo Coelho (Brazilian;  Jornal de Letras, the great authority on
literature and the Portuguese literary market, 
		declared that The Alchemist had sold more copies than any
other book written in Portuguese in the entire history of the language; In
1999, he was given the prestigious Crystal Award)
Laura Esquivel (Mexican; Like Water for Chocolate won the prestigious ABBY
award, which is given annually 
by the American Booksellers Association to the book the members of the
organization most enjoyed hand-
selling.) 
Maria Amparo Escandon (Mexican; named the "Writer to Watch" by Newsweek
Magazine in 1999 and the 
"Writer to Watch" by the Los Angeles Times in 2000)
Carlos Fuentes (Born in Panama City to a Mexican diplomat, Fuentes was
raised in Washington, D.C., Buenos 
Aires, Argentina, and Santiago, Chile; he has received numerous literary
awards, including the Cervantes 
Prize in 1987. Fuentes' major works include: Where the Air is Clearer
(1958); The Death of Artemio Cruz 
(1962); A Change of Skin (1967); Terra Nostra (1975); The Hydra Head (1978);
The Old Gringo (1985); 
and The Campaign (1990)
Dagoberto Gilb (Los Angeles: mother was Mexican, father was of German
descent; The Magic of Blood won 
the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award, PEN/Faulkner finalist)
Ray Gonzalez (Born in El Paso, Texas; The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande
(2002) won a 2003 Minnesota Book 
		Award in Poetry, The Heat of Arrivals (1996) won a 1997
PEN/Josephine Miles Book Award, and The Underground Heart (2002) received
the 2003 Carr P. Collins/Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of
Nonfiction, He received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Literature from the
Border Regional Library Association in 2003 and is a Full Professor in the
MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis)
Rolando Hinojosa (Mercedes, Texas; The first Chicano author to receive a
major international literary award, 
		Rolando Hinojosa won the prestigious Premio Casa de las
Américas for Klail City y sus alrededores, part of a series of novels known
to English-speaking readers as "The Klail City Death Trip")
Benito Pastoriza Iyodo (Puerto-Rico; The Ateneo Puertorriqueño awarded him
prizes for his book of poetry 
		Gotas verdes para la ciudad and the short story entitled "El
indiscreto encanto". His poetry has also won awards from the University of
Puerto Rico, the Chicano Latino Literary Prize and Voces Selectas of Luz
Bilingual Publishing. Pastoriza was one of the founders of the magazine
Tinta, which specializes in the diffusion of new literature written by
Latinos in the United States.)
Gary D. Keller *NOT AN AUTHOR (San Diego, Cali.; 2006 NACCS Scholar who has
continuously made 
		available to classes in Chicana and Chicano Studies over 150
scholarly and creative books, is an extremely successful grant writer that
has secured over $30 million dollars in federal and private funding and with
such monies has incrementally contributed to increasing the number of
Chicano and Hispanic graduate students in the universities, has provided a
scholarly press through which young  scholars have established a national
reputation and secured tenure, has been a NACCS member since the 1970s, is a
leading scholar in bilingualism and Chicano film)
Max Martinez (San Antonio, Texas; poet)
Pat Mora (El Paso Texas; Kellogg National Leadership fellowships award, the
national endowment for the Arts 
award, the southwest book awards, and the Aztlán literature Awards)
Alejandro Morales (novel Caras viejas y vino nuevo is generally recognized
as one of the classics of Chicano 
literature)
Carlos Morton (playwright)
Manuel Gutierrez Najera (Mexico City; very, very important 19th century
poet)
José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico City; Pacheco is a well-known translator of
works by Samuel Beckett, Yevgeny 
		Yevtuschenko, and Albert Einstein, among others. He was
awarded with the Mexican National Poetry Prize in 1969 for his collection No
me preguntas cómo pasa el tiempo. His collection El silencio de la luna was
awarded the Premio José Asunción Silva for the best book in Spanish to
appear in any country between 1990 and 1995. Pacheco is considered the most
important Mexican poet of the generation following Octavio Paz and Alfonso
Reyes)
Americo Paredes (Brownsville, Texas; generally recognized as one of the
seminal Mexican American scholars 
of the 20th century)
Octavio Paz (Mexico City; awards include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the
most important award in the 
		Spanish-speaking world -the prestigious American Neustadt
Prize in 1982, and in 1990 the Nobel Prize for Literature)
Carlos Pellicer (born in Villahermosa, Tabasco; was part of the first wave
of modernist Mexican poets and was 
heavily active in the promotion of Mexican art and literature)
Elena Poniatowska (born in Paris but, as a child, moved to Mexico; recipient
of numerous awards and honors, 
		including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Emeritus Fellowship
from Mexico's National Council of Culture and Arts. In 1979 she became the
first woman to win the Mexican national award for journalism)
Alfonso Reyes (Mexican; deeply influenced an entire generation of writers in
his native land and elsewhere in 
		Latin America. The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges
considered him the greatest prose writer in Spanish in any era)
Alberto Rios (Nogales, Arizona; recipient of the Western Literature
Association's Distinguished Achievement 
		Award, the Arizona Governor's Arts Award, fellowships from
the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt
Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, six Pushcart
Prizes in both poetry and fiction, and inclusion in The Norton Anthology of
Modern Poetry, as well as over 175 other national and international literary
anthologies)
Tomás Rivera (Crystal City, Texas; very important Chicano author and
scholar.  All of his works, including his 
essays, are now found in Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, edited by Julián
Olivares (1992)
Juan Rulfo (born as Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Vizcaíno Rulfo in Sayula,
Jalisco; one of Mexico's most 
		esteemed authors. Rulfo's reputation is based on two slim
books: El llano en llamas (1953), a collection of short stories, and the
novel Pedro Páramo (1955), one of the models for Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude).
Gary Soto (Fresno, California; in 1999 he received the Literature Award from
the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, 
		the Author-Illustrator Civil Rights Award from the National
Education Association, and the PEN Center West Book Award for Petty
Crimes-among many other awards)
Luis Valdez (Delano, California; regarded as the father of Chicano theater)
Evangelina Vigil-Pinon (San Antonio, Texas; poet, book Thirty an' Seen a Lot
won American Book Award in 
1983)
Alma Villanueva (Lompoc, California; works include The Ultraviolet Sky (won
an American Book Award, 
		listed in 500 Great Books By Women)- Naked Ladies (won the
PEN Oakland fiction award, anthologized in Caliente, The Best Erotic Latin
American Writing)- Luna's California Poppies and Weeping Woman, La Llorona
and Other Stories, a collection of short stories. Her fiction and poetry has
been widely anthologized in the USA and abroad, and is included in textbooks
from grammar to university level.
Tino Villanueva (San Marcos, Texas; founded Imagine Publishers, Inc., and
edited Imagine: International 
Chicano Poetry Journal. In 1994 Villanueva won the American Book Award for
his book-length 
poem, Scene From the Movie Giant)
Jose Antonio Villarreal (Los Angeles, California; known widely by scholars
of American literature as the 
"Founder of Chicano Literature")
Victor Villaseñor (Carlsbad, California; his first novel, Macho!, was
originally published by Arte Público Press 
		in 1973. The book, which the Los Angeles Times compared to
the best of Steinbeck, eventually led to the publication of the bestseller,
Rain Of Gold (1991). Published in seven languages and required reading by
thousands of teachers and school systems across the nation, Rain Of Gold is
the first of a quartet of books that tells the story of Villaseñor's family
from the Mexican Revolution to the late 20th century).

REFERENCE RESOURCES:

Hispanic Heritage site from GALE (free resource, really cool):
<http://www.gale.com/free_resources/chh/>

Latino and Latina Writers: Volume 1 of this set is Chicano and Chicana
Authors

<http://www.mla.org/ade/bulletin/N115/115020.htm> 
A link to Chicano/Chicano bibliography.

<http://www.georgetown.edu/tamlit/essays/chicano.html> 
is a good source for background information.

A nice bibliography for Chicano/Chicana authors is at
<http://www.mla.org/ade/bulletin/N115/115020.htm>
(Modern Language Association).

Reforma's website
<http://www.ala.org/ala/ourassociation/othergroups/affiliates/REFORMA.htm>

Cortes, Eladio. Dictionary of Mexican Literature Contains approximately 500
entries covering the most important writers, literary schools, and cultural
movements in Mexican literary history. Emphasis on 20th century figures



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: winmail.dat
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 10052 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/publib/attachments/20060706/e61f6a0e/winmail.bin