Helena Maria Viramontes

Helena Maria Viramontes
A photograph of Helena Maria Viramontes at the Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival September 30, 2006.

Helena Maria Viramontes (born February 26, 1954) is an American fiction writer and professor of English.

Contents

Childhood and education

Viramontes was born into a Mexican-American family.

Viramontes graduated from Garfield High School, which was one of the high schools that participated in the 1968 Chicano Blowouts, a series of protests against unequal conditions in East Los Angeles public schools. The Chicano Movement would play a significant role in her development as a writer. She then worked part-time while attending Immaculate Heart College, from which she earned her Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1975.

Viramontes attended the graduate program in creative writing at the University of California, Irvine. In 1977, her short story "Requiem for the Poor" was awarded a prize from Statement Magazine. In 1979, she won a literary prize from the Spanish department at UC Irvine. In 1981, she left the MFA program. In 1985, Arte Público Press published The Moths, collection of short stories. During her hiatus from academia she published in many underground literary journals such as ChismeArte. In 1988, she co-edited Chicana Creativity and Criticism with María Herrera-Sobek, a volume dedicated to the literary output of Mexican-American women. She returned to UC Irvine to complete her MFA, which was awarded in 1994. As part of the program, she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a writing workshop with the Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez. In 1995, her first novel Under the Feet of Jesus was published to critical acclaim.[citation needed] Recently, Their Dogs Came With Them, a novel that took her 17 years to complete, has been published and is gaining notoriety for its tough characters and strikingly personal and realistic prose. This novel is largely inspired by her childhood in the midst of East Los Angeles, with the gang conflicts and social strife at the center of her novel. She has said that her house is next to four cemeteries, and that when the freeways were built in East Los Angeles in the 1960s, myth has it that the cement was poured over the resting places of some forgotten souls; their bones disturbed. She had been spurred to write the novel because of her passion not to let these souls be forgotten, while at the same time telling a beautifully woven work on life.

Professional career

Her short stories have been published in a variety of literary journals. The major themes of her stories are informed by her childhood experiences in East Los Angeles, and the impact of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers on the life of her family. Many of her works feature strong female characters, and child protagonists figure prominently into her work. Other works have been deemed "democratic novels", in that no single protagonist dominates the storyline. Throughout all of her work, a love of life and of all of humanity pervades, despite poverty and the other challenges her characters face.

Viramontes is a currently a professor of English at Cornell University.

Helena Maria Viramontes was named a 2007 USA Ford Fellow by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists. That same year, she received the AAHHE's Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Award in Literary Arts or Publications.

Publications

Reference and external links


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужна курсовая?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • List of writers in Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing — Over 400 women writers are listed in Who s Who in Contemporary Women s Writing , edited by Jane Eldridge Miller, Routledge, 2001.A* Leila Abouzeid (born 1950), Moroccan novelist and journalist * Fawziyya Abū Khālid (born 1955), Saudi Arabian poet …   Wikipedia

  • List of Mexican American writers — The following is a list of Mexican American writers. Contents 1 A C 2 D J 3 K M 4 N R 5 S Z …   Wikipedia

  • List of Cornell University people — Cornellians are persons affiliated with Cornell University, commonly including alumni, current and former faculty members, students, and others. Here follows a list of notable Cornellians.40 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Cornell as… …   Wikipedia

  • Dos Passos Prize — The John Dos Passos Prize is awarded annually to the best currently under recognized American writer in the middle of their career. The Prize was founded at Longwood University in 1980 and is meant to honor John Dos Passos by recognizing other… …   Wikipedia

  • Arte Público Press — Arte Público Press, in Houston, Texas, is the largest US publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by US Hispanic authors. It publishes approximately 30 titles per year. Arte Público Press was founded in 1979 by its current director,… …   Wikipedia

  • Immaculate Heart College — was a private, Catholic college located in Los Angeles, California. The College was established in 1916 by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, ten years after they had founded Immaculate Heart High School on the 13 acre property.… …   Wikipedia

  • United States Artists — Infobox Non profit Non profit name = United States Artists Non profit Non profit type = Philanthropic arts organization founded date = 2005 founder = location = Los Angeles, California, USA origins = key people = Katharine DeShaw, Executive… …   Wikipedia

  • East Los Angeles — East Los Angeles …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Prix John Dos Passos — Le prix John Dos Passos, fondé en 1980 à l université de Longwood, entend récompenser chaque année un auteur américain ne recevant pas en milieu de carrière toute l attention qu il mériterait. Le prix est décerné par un comité issu du département …   Wikipédia en Français

  • List of Cornell University faculty — This list of Cornell University faculty includes notable current and former instructors and administrators of Cornell University, an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York. Cornell s faculty for the 2005–06 academic year included three …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”