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CHICANA AUTHOR AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST TO APPEAR IN OBERLIN APRIL 7
MARCH 13, 2001-- Denise Chavez, an award-winning Chicana author and performance artist, will give a talk and read from her latest novel Loving Pedro Infante at 3 P.M., Sunday, April 7, at the Oberlin Public Library, 65 South Main Street.
In Loving Pedro Infante -- released this month in the paperback edition by Washington Square Press -- Chavez evokes a vibrant Chicana world fueled by Pedro Infante -- the real-life Mexican film and music star killed in a 1957 plane crash -- who represents an eternal hope in the life of the novel's protagonist, Teresina Avila, a divorced teacher's aide born and raised and still living in fictional border town, whose one joy is her membership in the Pedro Infante Fan Club.
"The language is bawdy, sometimes downright sucio, but expressive in a way that pure Spanish or English couldn't be," says Publishers Weekly. "A liberating Chicana coming-of-a-certain-age tale, rooted in a profound love for la gente, the book gives us heroines we didn't know we had and makes us understand that love means embracing flaws of our own as well as those of others."
Chavez, who is from Las Cruces, New Mexico, is part of the "exciting phenomenon unfolding in American publishing today," said Marie Arana-Ward, deputy editor of The Washington Post Book World: "the emergence of a new wave of young, widely read Latino-American authors, not unlike the earlier flowering of African-American writers that brought us, over a period of years, everyone from James Baldwin to Terry McMillan."
In 1995, Chavez's debut novel, Face of an Angel, won the American Book Award and was a selection of the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literacy Award and Leila Acheson Wallace/Readers Digest Fund Writer's Award. She also has written a collection of short stories The Last of the Menu Girls.
Her plays have been produced at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and Joseph Papp's Festival Latino de Nueva in New York, and she has toured with her one-woman play, Women in the State of Grace, featuring nine diverse Latino characters ages 7 to 78.
A former member of the theater faculty at the University of Houston and a teacher of creative writing at New Mexico State, Chavez received her bachelor's degree in drama from New Mexico State and earned master's degrees in drama from Trinity University and in creative writing from the University of New Mexico.
The April 7 reading is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book sale and autograph session. The event is sponsored by the Oberlin Public Library, the Friends of the Oberlin Public Library, the Friends of the Oberlin College Library, and the Colleges Womens Studies Program, English Department and Department of Hispanic Studies with partial funding from the Ohio Arts Council.
Media Contact: Betty Gabrielli
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