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Cherríe
Moraga is playwright, poet and essayist whose plays and publications
have received national recognition, including a Theatre Communications
Group Theatre Artist Residency Grant in 1996, the NEA's Theatre
Playwrights' Fellowship in 1993, and two Fund for New American Plays
Awards (for "Shadow of a Man" in 1990 and "Watsonville:
Some Place Not Here" in 1995). An Oakland , CA based writer,
Moraga has premiered her work at Theatre Artaud, Theatre Rhinoceros,
the Eureka Theatre, and Brava Theater Center. Brava's production
of "Heroes and Saints" in 1992 received numerous awards
for best original script, including the Will Glickman Prize, the
Drama-logue and Critic Circles Awards and the Pen West Award. Her
plays have been presented throughout the Southwest, as well as in
Chicago, Seattle and New York. In 1995, "Heart of the Earth,"
Moraga's adaptation of the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation myth, opened
at the Public Theatre and INTAR Theatre in New York City. Both "Shadow
of a Man" and "Heroes and Saints" were collected,
along with Moraga's first play, "Giving Up the Ghost,"
in a volume entitled Heroes and Saints and Other Plays, published
by West End Press in 1994.
Cherríe Moraga has also published extensively as an essayist
and poet. She is the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color, which won the Before Columbus American
Book Award in 1986, and was re-released in a twentieth anniversary
edition in 2002. She is the author of Loving in the War Years: Lo
Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983) and The Last Generation (1993), published by South End Press of Cambridge, MA. She has edited
numerous publications including Cuentos: Stories by Latinas and
Third Woman: the Sexuality of Latinas. In 1997, she published a
memoir on motherhood entitled Waiting in the Wings (Ithaca, New
York: Firebrand Books).
From 1991 to 1997, Moraga was the Playwright-in-Residence at Brava
Theater Center of San Francisco during which time she developed
numerous plays, including "Watsonville: Some Place Not Here"
which premiered in 1996 and "The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea,"
Moraga's most recent work. Both works appear in current volumes
of Moraga’s plays, published by West End Press in 2001 and
2002.
Presently, Moraga serves as the Artist-in-Residence in the Department
of Drama and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Stanford
University. In addition to working independently with student-playwrights
at Stanford, Moraga teaches Latino Theater and Literature, Intensive
Playwriting and other Creative Writing courses, including poetry,
fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her most recent book of non-fiction
is an expanded edition of Loving in the War Years, published nearly
twenty years after the original, and includes essays and poetry
written in the late 1990s.
Cherrie Moraga is currently working on a theatrical collaboration, commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, with several Latino Playwrights entitled "Amor Eterno" and directed by Diane Rodriguez. Her play, "The Hungry Woman," will receive its Bay Area premiere in a co-production with El Teatro Campesino and Stanford University in April 2005. |
