The Chicana and Chicano Studies Department congratulates Dr. Cherrie Moraga for receiving the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.

Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, essayist and memoirist who initiated her public writing life as the co-editor (with Gloria Anzaldúa) of the avant-garde feminist work, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. As a political and literary essayist, she has published several collections of writings, including: A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness; _Loving in The War Year_s; The Last Generation; and, Waiting in the Wings – Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. Moraga 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 many other honors.

As a playwright, she has received two Fund for New American Plays Awards, the NEA Playwright’s Fellowship, a TCG and two MAP Grants, as well as a Drama-logue and Critics Circle Award, and the Pen West Award. She has published three volumes of plays: Heroes & Saints & Other Plays; Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt; and The Hungry Woman/Heart of the Earth. In August 2017, her most recent play, Mathematics of Love, which she also directed, premiered at Brava Theater Center in San Francisco.

For over twenty years, Moraga served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. There she mentored a full generation of now published writers and professional playwrights who credit Moraga as one of their most influential teachers. This Fall (2017) Maestra Moraga joined the faculty in the Department of English at UCSB, where in addition to her teaching, she will work with her artistic partner, Celia Herrera Rodriguez, to establish Las Maestras Center for Chicana and Indigenous Thought and Art Practice.