Alicia Gaspar de Alba is a scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.

Biography

Alicia Gaspar de Alba comes from the border between El Paso

El Paso

El Paso, a city in the U.S. state of Texas, on the border with Mexico.El Paso may also refer to:-Geography:Colombia:* El Paso, CesarSpain:*El Paso, Santa Cruz de TenerifeUnited States:...

 and Ciudad Juárez

Ciudad Juárez

Ciudad Juárez , officially known today as Heroica Ciudad Juárez, but abbreviated Juárez and formerly known as El Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juárez's estimated population is 1.5 million people. The city lies on the Rio Grande...

, where she lived until age 27. She has a B.A. (1980) and a M.A. (1983) in English from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico (1994). She started her doctoral work at the University of Iowa in 1985 but left after a year, then lived in Boston, Massachusetts for four years. In 1994, she was hired as one of six founding faculty members of the then César Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies at University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

. She has published and organized a conference on the Juarez murders

Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez

The phenomenon of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, called in Spanish the feminicidios and las muertas de Juárez , involves the violent deaths of hundreds of women since 1993 in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a border city across the Rio Grande from the U.S. city of El...

. Alicia Gaspar de alba also keeps a regular blog called "Cooking With Sor Juana".

Awards

• International Latino Book Award for Spanish Translation of Desert Blood, Sangre en el desierto (trans. Rosario Sanmiguel) (2009)
• Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence (UCLA) 2008
• Lambda Literary Award
  Lambda Literary Award
  Lambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the US-based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works which celebrate or explore LGBT themes. Categories include Humor, Romance and Biography. To qualify, a book must have been published in the United States in the year current to the award...
  
   for Best Lesbian Mystery (2005)
• International Latino Book Award for Best English-Language Mystery (2005)
• Latino Literary Hall of Fame for Best Historical Fiction (2000)
• Border-Ford/Pellicer-Frost Award for Poetry (1998)
• Shirley Collier Prize for Literature (UCLA)(1998)
• Premio Aztlán Literary Prize
  Premio Aztlán Literary Prize
  The Premio Aztlán Literary Prize is a national literary award for emerging Chicana/o Chicano authors, founded in 1993 by Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya...
  
   (1994)
• Massachusetts Artists' Foundation Fellowship Award in Poetry (1989)

Works

• Our Lady of Controversy: Alma Lopez's "Irreverent Apparition" (co-edited with Alma Lopez
  Alma Lopez
  Alma Lopez is a Mexican-born artist. She was born in Los Mochis, Sinaloa and is married to Alicia Gaspar de Alba.-Heaven 2 mural:Heaven 2 was a mural displayed outside La Galería de la Raza from November 2000 to January 2001. It portrays a woman on her deathbed thinking of herself and her lover...
  
  ) (University of Texas Press 2011)
• Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera (editor) (University of Texas Press 2010)
• Calligraphy of the Witch (Saint Martin's Press 2007)
• Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders (Arte Publico Press 2005)
• La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge: Poetry y Otras Movidas (Arte Publico Press 2003)
• Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (editor) (Palgrave/Macmillan 2003)
• Sor Juana's Second Dream (University of New Mexico Press 1999)
• Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House (University of Texas Press1998)
• "La Frontera," "Domingo Means Scrubbing," and "Beggar on the Cordoba Bridge. " Floricanto Si!: A Collection of Latina Poetry. Eds. Bryce Milligan, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela De Hoyos. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. 135-138.
• "The Politics of Location of the Tenth Muse of America: An Interview with Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz." In Living Chicana Theory. Ed. Carla Trujillo. Berkely, Calif. : Third Women Press, c 1998. 136-166.
• "After 21 Years, a Postcard?" and "Bamba Basilica." In The floating Borderlands; Twenty-five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature. Ed. Lauro Flores. Seattle: University of Washington Press, c1998. 235-237.
• "Born in East L.A. : An Exercise in Cultural Schizophrenia." The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader. Eds. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. New York: New York University Press, c1998. 226-230.
• "The Alter-Native Grain: Theorizing Chicano/a Popular Culture." Cultures and Differences: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States. Ed. Antonia Darder. Westport, Conn. : Bergin and Garvey, 1995. 103-123.
• "Malinche's Rights." Currents from the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Ed. Ray Gonzalez. New York: Harcourt Brace, c1994. 261-267.
• "Malinchista, A Myth Revised," "Literary Wetback," and "Making Tortillas." Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, c1993.
• "Facing the Mariachis." Latina Women's Voices from the Borderlands. Ed.Lillian Castillo-Speed. New York: Simon and Schuster, c1995. 37-49.
• The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories (Bilingual Press 1993)
• "The Last Rite." Mirrors Beneath the Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano Writers. Ed. Ray Gonzalez. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press; East Haven, CT: Distributed by InBook, 1992. 312-321.
• "Beggar on the Cordoba Bridge," collection of poems in Three Times A Woman: Chicana Poetry (Bilingual Press, 1989)

"Alicia's poetry and fiction have been anthologized in numerous publications, and her novels have been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian"

Critical studies

• Allatson, Paul. Book review of Sor Juana’s Second Dream. In Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 26.2 (Fall 2001): pp. 231–37.
• Allatson, Paul. “A Shadowy Sequence: Chicana Textual/Sexual Reinventions of Sor Juana.” Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 33.1 (May 2004): pp. 3–27.
• Chávez-Silverman, Susana. “Alicia Gaspar de Alba.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. Eds. Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Vol. 2: pp. 185–86.
• Marchino, Lois A. The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Vivancos Perez , Ricardo F. Los discursos sobre sexualidad en la obra de Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Dissertation: Thesis (M.A. )--Texas A & M University, 2002.

External links

• Biography from the Cesar Chavez Department at UCLA
• Alicia's Website
• Desert Blood site
• Alicia's Blog