Luis
J. Rodriguez has emerged and is recognized as one of the leading contemporary
Chicano writers in the country with fourteen published books in memoir, fiction,
nonfiction, children's literature, and poetry. His poetry has won a Poetry Center
Book Award, a PEN Josephine Miles Literary Award and a Paterson Poetry Book Prize,
among others. His children's books-America is Her Name and It Doesn't
Have to be This Way: A Barrio Story-have won a Patterson Young Adult Book
Award, two "Skipping Stones" Honor Awards and a Parent's Choice Book
Award. A novel, Music of the Mill (2005) and a short story collection, The
Republic of East LA (2001), are from Rayo Books/Harper Collins.
Luis is best known for his 1993 memoir
of gang life, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. Selling
more than 300,000 copies, it garnered a Carl Sandburg Literary Award, a Chicago
Sun-Times Book Award, and was designated a New York Times Notable Book. Always
Running was turned into a stage play by the Cornerstone Theater Company
and performed for 6,000 high school students in the Mark Taper Auditorium of
the Los Angeles Public Library from 2003-2005; and at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood
for a limited run in 2005. Written as a cautionary tale for Luis’ then
15-year-old son Ramiro--who had joined a Chicago gang--the memoir is popular
among youth and teachers.. Despite this, the American Library Association in
1999 called Always Running one of the 100 most censored books in the
United States.
Luis, founder of Tia Chucha Press, a small
poetry publisher producing quality cross-cultural poetry collections, chapbooks,
and CDs for twenty years, is also cofounder of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore
located in and serving the Northeast San Fernando Valley. His latest book "My
Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poems" (Curbstone Press) won the
2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Limited-edition
hand-made art books and broadsides of Luis' poems have also been printed by C & C
Press of Pajaro, for sale to collectors, universities, libraries and other institutions,
including the works Seven, Two Women/Dos Mujeres and Making
Medicine.
