Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, and essayist who is best known as the co-editor of the avant-garde feminist work, This Bridge Called My Back:  Writings by Radical Women of Color.  As an essayist and poet, Moraga has published several collections of writings, including:  A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness and Loving in The War Years.  In 2019, Farrar, Straus and Giroux released her latest work, Native Country of the Heart – A Memoir.  She is the recipient of the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lambda Foundation’s “Pioneer” award, among other honors.

 

An award-winning playwright, Moraga has published three volumes of plays and directed the premiere production of several of her own works, including New Fire – To Put Things Right Again, The Mathematics of Love, Digging Up the Dirt, and The Hungry Woman – A Mexican Medea.

Once taught under María Irene Fornes’ tutelage at INTAR theater in NYC, Moraga has, herself,  mentored over two generations of now published writers and professional playwrights who credit her as one of their most influential teachers.  In 2017, she joined the faculty in the Department of English at UC Santa Barbara, where she also serves as the co-director of Las Maestras Center for Xicana and Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Practice. She is currently completing a screen play entitled “Senora de los Blues” on the life of Chavela Vargas, commissioned by LevelForward productions.  Although only in the Bay half-time these days, she still considers Oakland, California her home.