This innovative collection pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements.

Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. The collection brilliantly intersects artistic visual and literary cultural productions, allowing complex themes to emerge, such as the fragility of life, sexism and misogyny, Chicana agency and forging one’s own path, the struggles of becoming a writer and battling self-doubt, economic instability, and political engagement and activism.

Arranged chronologically by birth order of the authors, the book can be read cover to cover for a genealogical overview, or scholars and general readers can easily jump in at any point and read about an individual author, regardless of the chronology.

Biographies included in this work include Raquel Valle-Sentíes, Angela de Hoyos, Montserrat Fontes, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Norma E. Cantú, Denise Elia Chávez, Carmen Tafolla, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, and Demetria Martínez.

Contributors
Cordelia E. Barrera
Mary Pat Brady
Norma E. Cantú
María Jesus Castro Dopacio
Carlos Nicolás Flores
Myrriah Gómez
Maria Magdalena Guerra de Charur
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Georgina Guzmán
Cristina Herrera
María Esther Quintana
Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson
Meagan Solomon
Lourdes Torres
Raquel Valle-Sentíes
Jen Yáñez-Alaniz

Norma E. Cantú is a scholar-activist who currently serves as the Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University. She is founder and director of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa and has published fiction, poetry, and personal essays, including the award-winning novels Canícula and Cabañuelas.

Raquel Valle-Sentíes, an artist, poet, and playwright, was born and raised in Laredo, Texas. Her poetry has been published widely, and she has authored four full-length plays and three one-act plays. Valle-Sentíes has also won numerous awards for her oil paintings in state and international competitions.
 

“Chicana Portraits beautifully links Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits of twelve amazing Chicana writers with their critical biographies, focusing on their growth as artists, writers, activists, feminists, social justice warriors. This collection demonstrates the power of the written word and visual culture as Chicana feminist praxis.”—C. Alejandra Elenes, author of Transforming Borders: Chicana/o Popular Culture and Pedagogy

“This collection gives an excellent overview of writers who have been highly instrumental in putting Chicana letters on the larger U.S. literary map.”—T. Jackie Cuevas, author of Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique— -