Born high in the Andes Mountains in Quito, Ecuador at an altitude of 9,000 feet above sea level, author Cecilia Velástegui has found success as an author of adult and children's books due to her extensive travel, her chameleon nature and "the serendipity of the Spanish tongue."
Jeanne Córdova, the prolific journalist, pioneer activist and resounding voice of the national lesbian feminist movement, didn't know she was Chicana until the age of 22, and that discovery expanded her disposition.
Colombian-born author Adriana Páramo left her native country 23 years ago. Geographical exploration and global wandering shaped the way she sees the world and the way she describes it, and this has been made abundantly clear by her books, "My Mother's Funeral" and "Looking for Esperanza."
When Spanish-born author Maria E. Andreu was five years old, she wrote what she thought was original stories. In retrospect, "Sleeping Beauty" as told by her wasn't quite an original composition. However, the young adult novel, "The Secret Side of Empty," which tells a candid and hard-boiled account of immigration, certainly is an original and powerful work.
Angela Cervantes, author of "Gaby, Lost and Found," has employed her love of writing to pen the influence of friendship, animals, immigration and hope in the lives of children, by use of diverse and strong characters.
Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, author, academic, unapologetic border-crosser and ex-DJ, was "made in Mexico but born in the U.S," or so he tells his students. His varied identities --Chicano, border-crosser and voracious reader-- has helped to shape his life as a writer.
Mexican-American social entrepreneur and the award-winning author of "Seven for the Revolution" Rudy Ruiz depicts yearning and suffering on the page with purpose and intrigue, converting backstory and conversations into thunderous, nuanced stories. And employs his social interests to create a more conscious, original story.
"Emma Gomez: A Courageous Woman Displays True Grit" tells a harrowing story, one that focuses on the importance of smaller things, as well as burdens that people carry.
Cuban stories that captured a young girl's childhood just after the turn-of-the-century, the subsequent whims of emigration and harrowing tales of motherhood fed author Chantel Acevedo. Acevedo's grandmother, who orated those stories, inspired the author to be a storyteller, and she taught her the language of a narrative.
Helena Maria Viramontes, critically acclaimed author and professor, reinforces the belief that fiction can rise from experience and personal understanding, amass amid the memories of generations of Chicano families raised in East Los Angeles, and grow around the fervor of familial love that only words can attempt to capture.
In this edition of Latin Post's "Palabras" series, the delightful Rudy Ch. Garcia chats about his writing, and purposes of creating Chicano literature that doesn't confOrm to any rules.
Cisneros still has an enduring relationship with libraries. While she no longer treks to the library to find herself weighed down by borrowed literature (with much thanks to her assistant, who makes research trips for her), she continues to donate to libraries, contribute time to libraries, persuade young children to acquire library cards and patronizes the gift shop section of the library so she doesn't have to give the books back.
Chicana novelist and poet Ana Castillo who coined the term "Xicanisma" at a time when the lives of Chicanas were finally being formalized into writing.
Yo-yoing between birthplace Bogota, Colombia and New York City since the age of 18 sparked an insatiable need for author Angela Lang to travel. When she wasn't able to satisfy the urge to travel physically, she did so mentally: happily ingesting highly-imaginative Colombian literature and sauntering toward the great entryway of world creation, keeping one leg in the world of journalism the other in the world of literature
