Cherríe Moraga is playwright, poet, and essayist whose plays and publications have received national recognition, including: a TCG Theatre Artist Residency Grant, the NEA’s Theatre Playwrights’ Fellowship, two Fund for New American Plays awards, the Pen West Award, a Drama-logue and Critic Circles Award, two Gerbode-Hewlett Playwrights Collaboration Awards, and several Creative Work Fund and MAP Fund Grants. In 2007, she was awarded the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature (Drama) and is a recipient of The American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2013, she received the “Pioneer” Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation.
Moraga is the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which won the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1986. She is the author of several titles, including Waiting in the Wings – Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (Firebrand, 1997). In 2011, Duke University Press published her most recent essay collection, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000-2010. Her three volumes of drama are published through West End Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico. They include: Heroes and Saints and Other Plays; Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt; and, The Hungry Woman.
A Bay Area playwright, Moraga plays have been developed and presented in San Francisco and throughout the Southwest, as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and New York. In 1995, “Heart of the Earth,” Moraga’s adaptation of the Maya Popol Vuh, premiered at the Public Theatre. Her most recent play, NEW FIRE—To Put Things Right Again (with visual artist, Celia Herrera Rodríguez), had its world premiere at Brava Theater Center in January 2012, where over 3,000 people witnessed the work in its 10-day run.
For over 15 years, Moraga has served as Artist in Residence in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, with a joint appointment in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. She is a founding member of La Red Xicana Indígena, a network of Xicanas working in education, the arts, and international organizing.
