Chicana Author Sandra Cisneros to Recieve First Gloria E. Anzaldua Distinguished Lecture Award (4/30

The Chicana/o Latina/o Research Center at UC Santa Cruz (CLRC) is pleased to announce its first annual Gloria E. Anzaldúa Distinguished Lecture Award Ceremony. Noted Chicana author and MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient Sandra Cisneros will accept the award and read from her work at 5pm on Sunday, April 30, 2006 at Watsonville’s Mello Center for the Performing Arts.

The CLRC has established the Distinguished Lecture Award in Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa’s name to honor her extensive creative work in Chicano/a and feminist issues. Anzaldúa, a public intellectual and creative writer, passed away at her home in Santa Cruz in May of 2004. Gloria Anzaldúa is considered one of the boldest feminist thinkers and social justice activists of our time. Anzaldúa wrote the landmark Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Consciousness (Spinters/Aunt Lute 1989), named one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by Hungry Mind Review and Utne Reader. She published essays, poetry, short stories, interviews, anthologies and children’s books.

One of the first openly lesbian Chicana writers, Anzaldúa played a key role in redefining queer, female, and Chicano/a identities, and has inspired generations of people to write and work for social justice. Gloria was part of the Santa Cruz intellectual community for over 20 years. She was born in South Texas and lived in many areas of the country before she settled in Santa Cruz. A deeply spiritual individual, Anzaldúa strove to integrate her life in the material world with el otro lado (the other side), meaning both Mexico and the spirit world. A display of her religious artifacts curated by oral historian Irene Reti is currently showing at UCSC’s McHenry Library. She was awarded her doctorate posthumously from UCSC in June of 2004.

Sandra Cisneros will be the first recipient of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Distinguished Lecture Award. CLRC Director Dr. Aida Hurtado, a specialist in Social Psychology and Chicana/o Studies at UC Santa Cruz, noted: “In choosing a recipient, we look for the scholar/activist who best embodies the spirit of creativity, struggle and intellectual honesty exemplified in Gloria’s work and life.” UCSC Assistant Professor of Community Studies and organizing committee member Dr. Marcia Ochoa added: “we believe that Sandra Cisneros’ work, like Gloria’s, has transformed the way the world understands what it means to be Chicana. We want to recognize her accomplishments in creative writing as well as her work to build communities of thinkers, artists and writers.”

Cisneros was born in Chicago in l954, the only daughter in a family of seven children. She has authored two acclaimed novels, three books of poetry, a collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Random House 1991), and

a children’s book. Her novel The House on Mango Street (Vintage 1991) is required reading in classrooms across the country, including elementary, middle, high school, and university-level. Cisneros’ most recent novel Caramelo (Knopf 2002) was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Cisneros has received numerous other awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1995), a Texas Medal of the Arts Award (2003), honorary doctorates from Loyola University (2002) and the State University of New York at Purchase (l993), and two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships for fiction and poetry (l988, l982). Cisneros lives in San Antonio, Texas, in a “formerly violet, now Mexican Pink house filled with many creatures, little and large.” This will be her first public appearance in the Bay Area since 2002.

About the CLRC
Founded in 1992, the CLRC continues to be the primary institution supporting research on Latina/o issues at UC Santa Cruz. With its goal of promoting “cross-border perspectives linking the Americas,” the CLRC supports research in the social sciences, policy studies, humanities, the arts and cultural studies. According to Hurtado, the CLRC investigates “the changing demographic and cultural panorama of Santa Cruz, San Jose and the wider Bay Area, which includes people of Mexican, indigenous and Central American origin,” as well as other US Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. The CLRC’s research pays particular attention to the diversity among Latina/o populations based on gender, race, class, nationality and sexuality. All donations and proceeds from the award ceremony will go towards supporting the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP), which is sponsored by the CRLC and functions to provide research experience and professional development to underrepresented students.

Noted Chicana author Sandra Cisneros will accept the award and read from her work at 5pm on Sunday, April 30, 2006 at the Mello Center for the Performing Arts in Watsonville. Tickets for the April 30 event will be sold through the UCSC ticket office. The Mello Center for the Performing Arts is located at the corner of East Beach and Lincoln Streets, at 250 East Beach Street in Watsonville, CA.

FOR TICKETS CONTACT: UCSC Ticket Office
Phone: (831) 459-2159
Web: http://events.ucsc.edu/tickets
Box Office: Theater Arts Center, UC Santa Cruz

Publicity Contact for Sandra Cisneros:
Susan Bergholz Literary Services
17 W. 10th Street, #5
NYC, NY 10011-8746
Phone: (212) 387-0545
FAX: (212) 387-0546