 CHERRIE L. MORAGA PLAYWRIGHT, ESSAYIST, POET, ACTIVIST EDUCATOR . . . Cherríe L. Moraga is playwright, poet, and essayist whose plays and publications have received national recognition, including a TCG Theatre Artist Residency Grant in 1996, the NEA's Theatre Playwrights' Fellowship in 1993, and two Fund for New American Plays Awards. In 2007, she was awarded the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature; in 2008, a Creative Work Fund Award, and in 2009, a Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwiting.
Creative Non-fiction/Poetry/Essays . . .
Moraga 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. She is the author of the now classic Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983/2003) and The Last Generation (1993), published by South End Press of Cambridge, MA. In 1997, she published a memoir on motherhood entitled Waiting in the Wings (Firebrand Books) and is completing a memoir on the subject of Mexican American cultural amnesia entitled Send Them Flying Home: A Geography of Remembrance. This year Moraga also completed a new collection of writings -- A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: A Decade of Discourse -- to be published by Duke University Press in Spring 2011.
Plays/Theater Moraga has also published three volumes of drama through West End Press of Albuquerque, NM. They include: Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (1994), Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt (2002), and The Hungry Woman (2001). In 2010, WEP will publish a volume of Moraga’s children’s plays, entitled Warriors of the Spirit. A San Francisco Bay Area playwright, 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 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. In 2005, "The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea" opened at The Pigott Theater at Stanford University, directed by Moraga and Adelina Anthony. In the years following, Moraga developed several new works, including: "Mathematics of Love," "Digging Up the Dirt" and “La Semilla Caminante/The Traveling Seed.” "Semilla," conceived and designed in collaboration with Alleluia Panis and Celia Herrera Rodriguez, opened in a workshop production with Campo Santo Theater of San Francisco on April 23-25, 2010. On July 30, 2010, Moraga's "Digging Up the Dirt" opened to a sold-out audience five-week run at Breath of Fire Latina Theater in Orange County, CA, in a co-production with See-what (Cihuat) Productions. Day Job For over ten years, Moraga has served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Drama at Stanford University and currently also shares a joint appointment with Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. She teaches Creative Writing, Xicana-Indigenous Performance, Latino/Queer Performance, Indigenous Identity in Diaspora in the Arts and Playwriting. She is proud to be a founding member of La Red Xicana Indígena, a network of Xicanas organizing in the area of social change through international exchange, indigenous political education, spiritual practice, and grass roots organizing.
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