Luis
J. Rodriguez has emerged as one of the leading Chicano writers
in the country with ten nationally published books in memoir,
fiction, nonfiction, children’s literature, and poetry.
Luis’ poetry has won a Poetry Center Book Award, a PEN Josephine
Miles Literary Award, and “Foreword” magazine’s Silver Book
Award, among others. His two children’s books have won a
Patterson Young Adult Book Award, two “Skipping Stones”
Honor Award, and a Parent’s Choice Book Award, among others.
A novel, Music of the Mill, was published in the spring
of 2005 by Rayo/HarperCollins; a poetry collection, My Nature
is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, 1989-2004, came out in
the fall of 2005 from Curbstone Press/Rattle Edition.
Luis
is best known for the 1993 memoir of gang life, Always Running:
La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. An international best seller—with
more than 20 printings, around 250,000 copies sold—the memoir
also garnered a Carl Sandburg Literary Award, a Chicago Sun-Times
Book Award, and was designated a New York Times Notable Book.
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. Efforts to remove his
books from public school libraries and reading lists have
occurred in Illinois, Michigan, Texas, and more recently in
California, where the battles were quite heated.
Yet
for all the controversy, Luis has gained the respect of the
literary community. In addition to the above honors, he has
received a Sundance Institute Art Writers Fellowship, a Lila
Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Lannan Fellowship
for Poetry, an Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, a National
Association for Poetry Therapy Public Service Award, a California
Arts Council Fellowship, an Illinois Author of the Year Award,
several Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the 2001Premio
Fronterizo, and “Unsung Heroes of Compassion” Award, presented
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Luis
is also known for helping start a number of prominent organizations—such
as Chicago’s Guild Complex, one of the largest literary arts
organizations in the Midwest, and the publishing house of
Tia Chucha Press. He is also one of the founders of Youth
Struggling for Survival, a Chicago-based not-for-profit community
group working with gang and nongang youth. He helped start
Rock A Mole (rhymes with guacamole) Productions, which produces
music/arts festivals, CDs, and film in Los Angeles. And he
is a cofounder of Tia Chucha’s Café & Centro Cultural—a bookstore,
coffee shop, performance space, art gallery, and workshop
center that opened in December 2001 in the Northeast San Fernando
Valley.
On
top of this, Luis has spent some twenty five years conducting
workshops, readings, and talks in prisons, juvenile facilities,
homeless shelters, migrant camps, universities, public and
private schools, conferences, Native American reservations,
and men’s retreats throughout the United States. He has also
traveled to Canada, Europe, Mexico, Central America, and Puerto
Rico doing similar work among disaffected populations. In
addition, he’s editor of the new Chicano online magazine,
Xispas.com.
Luis
has been part of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation’s Men’s
Conferences since 1994 with Mosaic founder Michael Meade,
healer Orland Bishop, West African teacher-elder Malidoma
Somé and American Buddhist Jack Kornfield. At these conferences,
the complex but vital issues of race, class, gender, and personal
rage are addressed with dialogue, ritual, story, poetry, and
art involving men of all walks of life, including those in
urban street gangs. He also created a CD of original music
and his poems called “My Name’s Not Rodriguez” for Dos Manos
Records, released in the summer of 2002.
Luis’
work has also been widely anthologized, including in Letters
of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters
(1997 Broadway Books/Kodansha American), and most recently
in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999 Thunder’s Mouth
Press) and Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (2001 Three
Rivers Press). His poems and articles have appeared in college
and high school textbooks throughout the United States and
Europe. He has done radio productions and writing for LA’s
KPFK-FM, California Public Radio as well as Chicago’s WMAQ-AM’s
All-News radio and WBEZ-FM. And his writings have appeared
over the last twenty-five years in The Nation, New York Times,
Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, U.S. News & World Report,
LA Weekly, Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, American Poetry
Review, San Jose Mercury, Grand Street, Utne Reader, Prison
Life, Progressive Magazine, Rock & Rap Confidential, among
others. In 2005, he was asked to become a contributing writer
to the LA Time’s “West” magazine.
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