Gwendolyn Zepeda | |
|---|---|
 Zepeda in 2009 | |
| Born | December 27, 1971 Houston, Texas, United States |
| Alma mater | University of Texas Austin |
| Occupation | Author |
| Honours | Houston's Inaugural Poet Laureate |
| Website | http://gwendolynzepeda.com |
Gwendolyn Zepeda (born December 27, 1971 in Houston, Texas) is an American author and poet of Mexican American descent. Zepeda is Houston's first Poet Laureate, serving a two-year term from 2013 to 2015. [1] She was succeeded by Leslie Contreras Schwartz. [2]
Zepeda's father was Mexican American and her mother was a white American of German, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry. [3] She was born and raised in Houston, Texas [4] where she attended Dow and Roosevelt elementary schools, Hamilton Middle School, Reagan High School (now Heights High School), and the High School for Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA). [5] She subsequently attended the University of Texas at Austin. [6]
In June 1997, Zepeda started an online journal titled Gwen's Trailer Trash Page, which eventually evolved into Gwen's Petty, Judgmental, Evil Thoughts. [7] Around the same time, she became a founding writer for Television Without Pity, a recap blog for late 1990s television shows, such as Ally McBeal and 7th Heaven. [8] She is notable as one of the first bloggers to write and sell a book. She later blogged for the Houston Chronicle in 2009 and 2010.
Zepeda sold her first book, To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him , a short story collection, in 2000. It was published by the Houston-based Latino publishing house, Arte Público Press, in 2004.
Her first novel, Houston, We Have a Problema is a chick lit novel and was published by Grand Central Publishing January 2009.
Her first picture book, Growing Up with Tamales, was published by Piñata Books, an imprint of Arte Público Press, in May 2008. It is a 2009 Charlotte Zolotow Highly Commended Title [9] and was nominated for a Tejas Star Award. Piñata Books published her second picture book, Sunflowers, in May 2009.
Arte Público Press published her first book of poetry, Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners, in 2014.
She cites Sandra Cisneros, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Louise Gluck, Jane Austen, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Judy Blume as some of her writing influences. [10]
PatMora is an American poet and author of books for adults, teens and children. Her grandparents came to El Paso from northern Mexico. A graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso, she received Honorary Doctorates from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo, and is an Honorary Member of the American Library Association. A literacy advocate, in 1996, she founded Children's Day, Book Day, in Spanish, El día de los niños, El día de los libros now celebrated across the country each year on April 30.
Heights High School, formerly John H. Reagan High School, is a senior high school located in the Houston Heights in Houston, Texas. It serves students in grades nine through twelve and is a part of the Houston Independent School District.
Floyd Salas was an American novelist, social activist, boxer and boxing coach. His work is well known in the San Francisco Bay Area and among aficionados of both Latino literature and 60s era protest literature.
Chicano poetry is a subgenre of Chicano literature that stems from the cultural consciousness developed in the Chicano Movement. Chicano poetry has its roots in the reclamation of Chicana/o as an identity of empowerment rather than denigration. As a literary field, Chicano poetry emerged in the 1960s and formed its own independent literary current and voice.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an American scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.
Arte Público Press is a publishing house associated with the University of Houston. It is the largest US publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by US Hispanic authors, publishing approximately 30 titles per year.
Roberta Fernández is a Tejana novelist, scholar, critic and arts advocate. She is known for her novel Intaglio and for her work editing several award-winning women writers. She was a professor in Romance Languages & Literatures and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia.
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista, as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
The Sixth Ward is a community in Houston, Texas, United States, one of the city's historic wards.
Sandra María Esteves is a Latina poet and graphic artist. She was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, and is one of the founders of the Nuyorican poetry movement. She has published collections of poetry and has conducted literary programs at New York City Board of Education, the Caribbean Cultural Center, and El Museo del Barrio. Esteves has served as the executive director of the African Caribbean Poetry Theater. She is the author of Bluestown Mockinbird Mambo and Yerba Buena. She lives in the Bronx.
Jovita Idar Vivero was an American journalist, teacher, political activist, and civil rights worker who championed the cause of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, which lasted a decade from 1910 through 1920, she worked for a series of newspapers, using her writing to work towards making a meaningful and effective change. She began her career in journalism at La Crónica, her father's newspaper in Laredo, Texas, her hometown.
Evangelina Vigil-Piñón is a Chicana poet, children's book author, director, translator, and television personality.
Graciela Limón is a Latina/Chicana novelist and a former university professor. She has been honored with an American Book Award and the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.
Maria Espinosa is an American novelist, poet, and translator.
Hispanic and Latino women in America have been involved in journalism for years, using their multilingual skills to reach across cultures and spread news throughout the 19th century until the common era. Hispanic presses provided information important to the Hispanic and Latin American communities and helped to foster and preserve the cultural values that remain today. These presses also "promoted education, provided special-interest columns, and often founded magazines, publishing houses, and bookstores to disseminate the ideas of local and external writers."
Carmen Tafolla is an internationally acclaimed Chicana writer from San Antonio, Texas, and a professor emerita of bicultural bilingual studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Tafolla served as the poet laureate of San Antonio from 2012 to 2014, and was named the Poet Laureate of Texas for 2015–16. Tafolla has written more than thirty books, and won multiple literary awards. She is one of the most highly anthologized Chicana authors in the United States, with her work appearing in more than 300 anthologies.
Sarah Cortez is a Latina poet, teacher, editor, and essayist from Houston, Texas. She is also a law enforcement officer who first gained acclaim for her poetry collection, How to Undress a Cop.
Rosaura Sánchez is a writer, storyteller, linguist and critic. Sánchez' "most singular and significant contribution to this field [Chicano bilingualism] is the formulation of a theoretical framework for the analysis of Chicano Spanish based on the premise that Spanish use in America must be considered in its social and verbal interactions." As an editor, one of her most relevant works was the novel Who Would Have Thought it? (1995) by writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton of California, published by the Arte Público Press in Houston, Texas.
René Saldaña Jr. is an American poet, novelist and educator. Currently, he is an associate professor of language and literature in the College of Education at Texas Tech University. He is also the author of several books for young readers, best known for The Jumping Tree and The Whole Sky Full of Stars. His publications have received many positive reviews and recognition from several literary circles.
Jasminne Mendez is an Afro-Latino American author, poet, playwright, performer and educator. She is a co-founder and the program director for Tintero Projects. She is co-host on the poetry and writing podcast series, InkWell, a collaboration between Tintero Projects and Inprint Houston. Mendez is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow and a Macondo and Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) alumni.
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