Author's Bio

Alicia Gaspar de Alba is a native of the El Paso/Juárez border and holds a Bachelor's (1980) and a Master's degree (1983) in English from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico (1994). She also did some of her doctoral work at the University of Iowa (1985).

She was hired at UCLA in 1994, as a founding faculty member of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies (formerly known as the César Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana/Chicano Studies). Alicia received early tenure in 1999, and in 2005 was promoted to the rank of Full Professor. She is jointly appointed to the English Department. Alicia offers courses in Chicano/a cultural studies, the U.S./Mexico border, Chicana lesbian literature, Chicana feminisms, and creative writing. She is a longstanding member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Faculty Advisory Committee, and is an Affiliated Faculty of the Women's Studies Programs. In 2000-01, she served as Interim Director of the LGBT Studies Program, and from 2002-2004, she was appointed Associate Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

In Fall 2003, Alicia organized "The Maquiladora Murders, Or, Who Is Killing the Women of Juárez?" a 3-day international conference co-sponsored by Amnesty International that brought over 1,500 attendees from across the country as well as from other parts of the world to the UCLA campus. The conference was a culmination of several years of research that Alicia was engaged in for Desert Blood/The Juárez Murders, which was released by Arte Publico Press in March 2005.

Alicia, or "Gaspar" as her students like to call her, is also the author of a historical novel on the 17th-century Mexican nun, poet, and scholar, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, entitled Sor Juana's Second Dream (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), which received the Best Historical Fiction Award in the Latino Literary Hall of Fame in 2000. The Spanish translation of Sor Juana's Second Dream, or El segundo sueño, was released in 2001 by Grijalbo Mondadori, which sold out in both Spain and Mexico, and the German translation of the novel was released in 2002 by the feminist press, Krug & Schadenberg. The paperback edition of Sor Juana's Second Dream will be released by University of New Mexico Press in Fall 2007.

Alicia's latest book of poetry and personal essay, La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge: Poetry y otras movidas, also published by Arte Publico Press, was released in fall 2003. She has also published a collection of short fiction, The Mystery of Survival (Bilingual Press, 1993), which was awarded the Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya "Premio Aztlán" in 1994. Her full-length collection of poems, "Beggar on the Córdoba Bridge," appears in the volume Three Times a Woman: Chicana Poetry (Bilingual Press, 1989).

Alicia's poetry and fiction have been anthologized in several publications, including, most recently, U.S. Latino Literature, edited by Gabriela Baeza Ventura (Pearson Longman, 2005); From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002, edited by Ishmael Reed (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2003), This Bridge We Call Home (Routledge, 2002), The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature (University of Washington Press, 1998), Latina: Women's Voices from the Borderlands (Simon & Schuster, 1995), Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers (Avon Books, 1995), Growing Up Chicana/o (William Morrow, 1994), and In Other Words: Literature by Latinas in the U.S. (Arte Publico Press, 1994). Her writing has also been published in French, German, Mexican, and Spanish anthologies of Chicano/a literature.

In 1989, Alicia received a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship Award in poetry; in 1992 she received a Chicana Dissertation Fellowship from the University of California, Santa Barbara; in 1993 she was awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship from the National Research Council; and in 1994, she received a Minority-Scholar-in-Residence postdoctoral fellowship at Pomona College. Her dissertation was awarded the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for Best Dissertation in American Studies in 1994. She has received numerous other writing and research grants, including a Rockefeller Fellowship for Latino/a Cultural Study at the Smithsonian and a UC Mexus Grant. In the Fall of 1999, she held the prestigious Roderick Endowed Chair in English at her alma mater, the University of Texas at El Paso, where she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor for one semester.

Aside from her novels, poetry books, and short story collection, Alicia has also published two academic books: Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (University of Texas Press, 1998), now in its third edition, is a cultural analysis of an exhibition and the politics of multiculturalism in mainstream museums, and Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003), is an anthology she edited on the representation of Chicana/o sexualities in popular culture studies. Some of her scholarly work has been translated into Spanish and Italian.

For those Concepción fans out there, you'll be happy to know that Alicia's third novel, CALLIGRAPHY OF THE WITCH, which finds Sor Juana's assistant, Concepción (from Sor Juana's Second Dream), being transported to New England aboard a pirate's ship to be embroiled later in the New England witchcraft trials, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in 2007.