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 books for children have won a Patterson Young Adult Book Award, two “Skipping Stones” Honor Awards, and a Parent’s Choice Book Award, among others. A novel, Music of the Mill, was published in Spring 2005 by Rayo/HarperCollins; a poetry collection, My Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, 1989-2004, came out in Fall 2005 from Curbstone Press/Rattle Edition.
Luis is best known for his 1993 memoir of gang life, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. An international best seller, with more than 20 printings, and 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 2001 Premio 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.
Article comments
1 - John Barone
We need to legalize drugs to stop the turf wars of Gangs we need the National Guard in Cities to restore order in our streets we also need to legalize prostitution to prevent the spread of AIDS