Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, essayist and memoirist who initiating her public writing life in 1981 as the co-editor, with Gloria Anzaldúa, of the avant-garde feminist work, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. As a political and literary essayist, she has published several collections of writings, including: A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness; Loving in The War Years; The Last Generation; and, Waiting in the Wings — Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Book Award, and the Lambda Foundation’s “Pioneer” award, among many other honors.

As a playwright, she has received two Fund for New American Plays Awards, the NEA Playwright’s Fellowship, a TCG and two MAP Grants, as well as a Drama-logue and Critics Circle Award, and the Pen West Award. She has published three volumes of plays: Heroes & Saints & Other Plays; Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt; and The Hungry Woman/Heart of the Earth. In August 2017, her most recent play, Mathematics of Love, which she also directed, premiered at Brava Theater Center in San Francisco.

For over twenty years, Moraga served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. There she mentored a full generation of now published writers and professional playwrights who credit Moraga as one of their most influential teachers.  In the Fall 2017 Maestra Moraga joined the faculty in the Department of English at UCSB, where she initiated an undergraduate Creative Writing specialization, which she now directs.  She also serves as the co-director,  with Celia Herrera Rodríguez,  of Las Maestras Center for Xicana[x]  Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Practice.

Moraga’s memoir, Native Country of the Heart was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the Spring of 2019. Most recently, La Maestra was awarded the Barnard College Medal of Distinction. https://barnard.edu/citation-cherrie-moraga