Richard T. Rodríguez is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Beginning fall 2025, he will join the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles as Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. He is the author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics and A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad, both published by Duke University Press. He is currently finishing a collection of poems about his time living in Chicago. He is a contributor to ¡Ay Tú! : Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros.
Book Festival Author
Richard T. Rodríguez
More About Richard T. Rodríguez
-
¡Ay Tú! : Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros
A comprehensive volume on the life and work of renowned Chicana author Sandra Cisneros.
Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), author of the acclaimed novel "The House on Mango Street" and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, was the first Chicana to be published by a major publishing house. "¡Ay Tú!" is the first book to offer a comprehensive, critical examination of her life and work as a whole. Edited by scholars Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano, this volume addresses themes that pervade Cisneros’s oeuvre, like romantic and erotic love, female friendship, sexual abuse and harassment, the exoticization of the racial and ethnic “other,” and the role of visual arts in the lives of everyday people. Essays draw extensively on the newly opened Cisneros Papers, housed in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, and the volume concludes with a new long-form interview with Cisneros by the award-winning journalist Macarena Hernández.
As these essays reveal, Cisneros’s success in the literary field was integrally connected to the emergent Chicana feminist movement and the rapidly expanding Chicanx literary field of the late twentieth century. This collection shows that Cisneros didn’t achieve her groundbreaking successes in isolation and situates her as a vital Chicana feminist writer and artist.
As these essays reveal, Cisneros’s success in the literary field was integrally connected to the emergent Chicana feminist movement and the rapidly expanding Chicanx literary field of the late twentieth century. This collection shows that Cisneros didn’t achieve her groundbreaking successes in isolation and situates her as a vital Chicana feminist writer and artist.
