Women's Studies Department   

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 Fellow for Literature.

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. 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 has just completed a new memoir on the subject of cultural memory and her mother’s passing from Alzheimer’s in 2005 entitled Send Them Flying Home:  A Geography of Remembrance.

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).  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.    

For over ten years, she has served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Drama (and more recently also in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity) at Stanford University, where she teaches Creative Writing, Chicano/Latino literature, Xicana-Indigenous Performance, and Dramatic Writing.   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.