Podcast appearances and mentions of Luis J Rodr

Luis J. Rodríguez was born in El Paso, Texas. He grew up in Watts and East Los Angeles, where his family faced poverty and discrimination. A gang member and drug user at the age of twelve, by the time he turned eighteen, Rodríguez had lost twenty-five of his friends to gang violence, drug overdoses, shootings, and suicide. He wrote two autobiographical accounts of his experiences with gang violence and addiction, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone, 2012), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, and Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. He is also a journalist and critic and the founder of Tía Chucha Press. www.TiaChucha.Org

(Airdate 3/2/23) Luis J. Rodríguez was born in El Paso, Texas. He grew up in Watts and the East Los Angeles area, where his family faced poverty and discrimination. A gang member and drug user at the age of twelve, by the time he turned eighteen, Rodríguez had lost twenty-five of his friends to gang violence, drug overdoses, shootings, and suicide. He wrote two autobiographical accounts of his experiences with gang violence and addiction, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, and Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. Luis is a two-time gubernatorial candidate and the founder of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural (and bookstore and publisher.) www.tiachucha.org

In conversation with Luis J. Rodríguez "Not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one" (The New York Times Book Review), Sandra Cisneros explores the themes of place, identity, and working-class culture in her novels, poems, and short stories. Her bestselling books include The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, and Loose Woman. She is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and numerous fellowships and honorary doctorates, among other honors. Cisneros is also the founder of the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, nonprofit organizations dedicated to encouraging emerging writers. Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo is a story about a young woman who leaves her Mexican family in Chicago to find literary success in Paris. A significant figure in Chicano literature, Luis J. Rodríguez is a poet, novelist, critic, and journalist. He is the founder of the Tia Chucha Press, the recipient of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award, and was the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate. (recorded 9/14/2021)

To wrap up 2019, Connor and Jack take on a poem as exquisite in its craft as it is emotionally forceful in its effect on the reader. They discuss the history of the United States' colonial expansion, the danger of using oblique language when writing history, and the way the poem's tone bridges the gap between the past and present. More about Luis J. Rodriguez, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/luis-j-rodriguez Cinco de Mayo By: Luis J. Rodriguez Cinco de Mayo celebrates a burning people, those whose land is starved of blood, civilizations which are no longer holders of the night. We reconquer with our feet, with our tongues, that dangerous language, saying more of this world than the volumes of textured and controlled words on a page. We are the gentle rage; our hands hold the stream of the earth, the flowers of dead cities, the green of butterfly wings. Cinco de Mayo is about the barefoot, the untooled, the warriors of want who took on the greatest army Europe ever mustered—and won. I once saw a Mexican man stretched across an upturned sidewalk near Chicago's 18th and Bishop one fifth of May day. He brought up a near-empty bottle to the withering sky and yelled out a grito with the words: ¡Que viva Cinco de Mayo! And I knew then what it meant— what it meant for barefoot Zapoteca indigenas in the Battle of Puebla and what it meant for me there on 18th Street among los ancianos, the moon-faced children and futureless youth dodging the gunfire and careening battered cars, and it brought me to that war that never ends, the war Cinco de Mayo was a battle of, that I keep fighting, that we keep bleeding for, that war against a servitude that a compa on 18th Street knew all about as he crawled inside a bottle of the meanest Mexican spirits. Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking 
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Acclaimed journalist and poet Luis J. Rodríguez, who chronicled his harrowing journey from gang member to a revered figure of Chicano literature, discusses the struggles of post-gang life with Father Gregory Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries and author of a bestselling memoir.