Book of the Month
CHICANA PORTRAITS: CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES OF TWELVE CHICANA WRITERS
Author: Norma Elia Cantú
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN-10: 0816551812 / ISBN-13: 978-0816551811
SUMMARY:
This innovative collection pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements.
Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. The collection brilliantly intersects artistic visual and literary cultural productions, allowing complex themes to emerge, such as the fragility of life, sexism and misogyny, Chicana agency and forging one’s own path, the struggles of becoming a writer and battling self-doubt, economic instability, and political engagement and activism.
Arranged chronologically by birth order of the authors, the book can be read cover to cover for a genealogical overview, or scholars and general readers can easily jump in at any point and read about an individual author, regardless of the chronology.
Biographies included in this work include Raquel Valle-Sentíes, Angela de Hoyos, Montserrat Fontes, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Norma E. Cantú, Denise Elia Chávez, Carmen Tafolla, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, and Demetria Martínez.
About the Author:
Award winning poet and author, Dr. Norma Elia Cantú was born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas to a Tejana mother and a Mexicano father. She began her academic career fifty years ago as a teaching assistant at what is now Texas A&M University, Kingsville, where she earned her MA in English. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska and taught at what is now Texas A&M International University in Laredo, at the University of Texas, San Antonio and the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She currently serves as the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teaches courses in Latinx Studies, Folklore, and Creative Writing. Her creative writing focuses on the US-Mexico Border and includes her novels Canícula and Cabañuelas as well as a poetry collection, Meditación fronteriza. Her most recent publication is the anthology Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers.
Website: https://tupress.org/author/norma-elia-cantu/
Conversations Book
WHAT HAPPENED TO RUTHY RAMIREZ
Author: Claire Jimenez
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538725967 / ISBN-13: 978-1538725962
SUMMARY:
A deeply powerful, raw debut novel of a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island who discovers their long missing sister is potentially alive and cast on a reality TV show, and they set out to bring her home.
The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen year old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman’s hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time?
The years since Ruthy’s disappearance haven’t been easy on the Ramirez family. It’s 2008, and their mother, Dolores, still struggles with the loss, Jessica juggles a newborn baby with her hospital job, and Nina, after four successful years at college, has returned home to medical school rejections and is forced to work in the mall folding tiny bedazzled thongs at the lingerie store.
After seeing maybe Ruthy on their screen, Jessica and Nina hatch a plan to drive to where the show is filmed in search of their long-lost sister. When Dolores catches wind of their scheme, she insists on joining, along with her pot-stirring holy roller best friend, Irene. What follows is a family road trip and reckoning that will force the Ramirez women to finally face the past and look toward a future—with or without Ruthy in it.
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love.
About the Author:
Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories, which received the 2019 Hornblower Award for a first book from the New York Society Library and was named a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards, a New York Public Library Favorite Book about New York, and Best Latino Book of 2019 by NBC News. She received her MFA from Vanderbilt University and her PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 2020, she cofounded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive. Currently she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Remezcla, AfroHispanic Review, PANK, The Rumpus, and Eater, among other publications. What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is her debut novel.
Website: https://www.clairejimenez.com/
Conversations Children’s Book
THE MYSTERY of LA LLORONA
AND MISTER LLORON
Author: Karen Gonzales
Publisher: 303 Publications, Inc
ISBN: ISBN-13 : 979-8218302559
SUMMARY:
Darla Zapien doesn’t like to wear her new glasses and begins seeing things her friends don’t see. Her friends warn that “La Llorona” who haunts the arroyos of New Mexico has arrived in the gully down the block.
Strange things start to happen soon after the friends wander down to the gully.
Will they find this legendary spirit who disguises herself during the day and steals children? Will someone disappear? Who is Mister Llorón?
In the summer of 1968, the friends find clues to try to solve a mystery.
About the Author:
Karen D. Gonzales is a native of Denver, Colorado and Author of a Children’s Chapter book, “The Mystery of La Llorona and Mister Llorón” and non-fiction essays published in Anthologies: “The Almagre Review Issue 5: Race, Class, Gender”; “Return of the Corn Mothers”; also Ramas y Raices: The Best of CALMA launching this summer. She is Co-Founder of Colorado Alliance of Latino Mentors and Authors and Coordinator of the Denver Las Comadres Book Club.
Websites: https://www.calmaco.org/team/karen-d.-gonzales-
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UPCOMING BOOKS
**APRIL 2024** Teleconference date: April 22
Book of the Month
Flesh and Spirit: Confessions of a Young Lord by Felipe Luciano
Conversations Book
Flores and Miss Paula by Melissa Rivero (mothers & daughters)
**MAY 2024** Teleconference date: May 27
Book of the Month
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
Conversations Book
Vanishing Maps by Cristina Garcia
**JUNE 2024** Teleconference Date: June 24
Book of the Month
Beautiful Monster: A Becoming by Miles Borrero
Conversations Book
Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawaii by Rudy P. Gueverra Jr.