Out Spotlight

Today's is a proud Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist,  and playwright. Today's Out Spotlight is Cherrie Moraga.

Cherrie L. Moraga was born in Whittier, California on September 25, 1952.  She is the daughter of  Anglo and  Chicana parents.

She earned her Bachelor's degree  in 1974 from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, California and her Master's from San Francisco State University in 1980. Between her Bachelor's and Master's degrees she worked as a high school teacher in Los Angeles. During this time, she enrolled in a writing class at the Women's Building and produced her first lesbian love poems. She decided to write as a lesbian and as a Chicana. In 1977, she moved to San Francisco and earned an MA from San Francisco State in 1980.   Of both Anglo and Mexican American heritage, her writing focuses on her experiences as a Chicana lesbian.


She has taught courses in dramatic arts and writing at various universities across the United States and is currently an artist in residence at Stanford University. Her play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, performed at the Brava Theatre Company of San Francisco in May, 1996, won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Fund for New American Plays Award. Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Moraga started Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first publisher dedicated to the writing of women of color in the United States.

She is perhaps best known for co-editing, with Gloria Anzaldúa, the anthology of feminist thought This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Along with Ana Castillo and Norma Alarcon, she adapted this anthology into the Spanish-language Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos.

Writings in the anthology, along with works by other prominent feminists of color, call for a greater prominence within feminism for race-related subjectivities, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism or Third World Feminism in the USA. Her first sole-authored book, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983), a combination of autobiographically modulated prose and poetry, is also an influential critical work among Chicana feminists and other feminists of color, and among scholars working in Chicano Studies.


Moraga was named a 2007 USA Rockefeller Fellow and granted $50,000 by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists. She won a Creative Work Fund Award in 2008, and the Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwriting in 2009.


She published A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010, in 2011. Her play New Fire: To Put Things Right Again had its world premiere January 11-29, 2012, in San Francisco, California.

 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 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.