Biography

Arteaga was born in East Los Angeles and raised in Whittier, California. He attended Monte Vista High School which has since been converted to a Los Angeles County Sheriff's academy. He received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in 1974, and a master's degree and doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz

University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...

 in 1984 and 1987, respectively.

From 1977-87, Arteaga taught as an instructor of Mexican American Studies and English at San José City College. He served as an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston

University of Houston

The University of Houston is a state research university, and is the flagship institution of the University of Houston System. Founded in 1927, it is Texas's third-largest university with nearly 40,000 students. Its campus spans 667 acres in southeast Houston, and was known as University of...

 from 1987-90. Arteaga originally joined the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 faculty in 1990 as an assistant professor of English and was tenured in the Department of Ethnic Studies in 1998. He became a Professor in 2008. His studies and teaching focused on the contributions of contemporary Chicano literature and music to American culture. He drew attention to the hybrid culture of Chicano writers by focusing on their hybrid use of language.

He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship (1993–94), a National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...

 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry (1995), and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award

PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award

According to its website, PEN Oakland was founded in 1989 by Ishmael Reed, who came up with the idea, and co-founders Floyd Salas, Reginald Lockett and Claire Ortalda, in order to “promote works of excellence by writers of all cultural and racial backgrounds and to educate both the public and the...

 (1998).

Poetry

• Cantos (Chusma House Publications, 1991) ISBN 0-9624536-2-5
• Love in the Time of Aftershocks (Chusma House and Moving Parts Press, 1998) ISBN 1-891823-00-0
• Red (Bilingual Review Press
  Bilingual Review Press
  Bilingual Review Press is an American publishing house specialising in the publication of scholarly and literary works by Hispanic and Latino American authors and researchers...
  
  , 2000) ISBN 0-927534-94-0
• Frøzen Accident (Tia Chucha, 2006) ISBN 1-882688-32-5

Essays

• An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands (Duke University Press
  Duke University Press
  Duke University Press is an academic publisher of books and journals, and a unit of Duke University. It publishes approximately 120 books annually and more than 40 journals, as well as offering five electronic collections...
  
  , 1994) ISBN 0-8223-1458-4
• Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
  
  , 1997) ISBN 0-521-57370-x