1318 Indian Camp Road, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27516

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local contact: madams@wcu.edu

Fax (919) 932-6508

Word Wide: Writers of the Americas will bring Luis Rodríguez to North Carolina from January 16, 2000, through April 9, 2000 for a ten-week literary residency in nine sites across the state. This residency, celebrating Latino writers and readers, is the most broad-based and far-reaching literary project ever undertaken in North Carolina. Mr. Rodríguez, a nationally known writer from Chicago, Illinois, will read at Western Carolina University's Coulter Auditorium on Wednesday, January 26 at 7:30 PM as part of a series of public readings, writing workshops, and other literary and cultural events with Latino writers, readers and storytellers from North Carolina. Admission is free and open to the public. Spanish-language translators will be available.

Rodriguez will also conduct a public workshop at The Writer's Workshop, St. Justin's Center (in St. Lawrence's Church) 92 Haywood Road, Asheville. Translators will be available for these events.

Word Wide is sponsored by the North Carolina Literary Consortium, a recently-established partnership of ten organizations, composed of college and university-sponsored writers’ readings series, Latino service organizations, and other arts and service organizations. The partners are the Albemarle Literary Center at Elizabeth City State University, Appalachian State University, Catawba College, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, El Centro Hispano, the Gaston County Library, Lenoir-Rhyne College, Student Action with Farmworkers, Western Carolina University, and the Writers Reading Series of Eastern North Carolina at East Carolina University. The fiscal agent for the project is the North Carolina Writers’ Network. This project has received support from the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is sponsored in Jackson County by Western Carolina University's Visiting Writers Series and Visiting Scholars fund.

State-Wide Residency Schedule

Word Wide will highlight the increasing cultural diversity of the state and broaden our understanding of our diverse cultures by showcasing Latin American poetry and literature, provide a role model of a successful artist to encourage the aspiring writers that exist in all communities, as well as build literary and literacy skills. During the Word Wide residency, Mr. Rodríguez will conduct writing workshops, public readings, activities in classrooms, teacher workshops and family programs in cooperation with other writers, scholars, and educators from the nine-plus communities that he will visit. 

Some of the many activities that will take during Rodriguez's stay in Jackson County include:

• A reading at Western Carolina University's Coulter Recital Hall
• Talks with students in Jackson County Schools
• Talks with students and teachers in Cherokee school system
• Meeting with at-risk teens at Aspire in Haywood County
• A session with the Asheville Writers' Workshop
• An informal talk with students in elementary education at WCU

Born in El Paso, Texas, in 1954, the son of Mexican immigrants, Luis Rodríguez grew up in Watts and East Los Angeles. Since he began writing in his early teens, his work has consistently won recognition. In 1989, his first book, Poems Across the Pavement, won the Poetry Center Book Award from San Francisco State University. In 1991, The Concrete River won a PEN West/Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. His 1993 Memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Simon & Schuster), won a Carl Sandburg Literary Award and a Chicago-Sun Times Book Award. It was also chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. Mr. Rodríguez is a recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, A Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, a National Association for Poetry Therapy Public Service Award, and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. He has been active for many years in community-based arts work—most recently through his affiliation with the Guild Complex, a major literary organization based in Chicago. He also founded and administers a press—Tia Chucha—that specializes in the work of Latino writers.

By his mid-teens, Luis Rodríguez had been a long-time gang member in his East Los Angeles barrio, participating in random and premeditated acts of violence, subjected to physical and verbal abuse by police, and using a battery of illegal drugs to numb himself to the sorrow and terror of la vida loca—a phrase adopted by gangs (decades before Ricky Martin recorded his hit song) to describe the craziness of their lives. Abandoned by his parents, who were struggling themselves to survive an alien culture far from their native districts in Mexico, and written off by school authorities, Luis Rodríguez turned to gang life for the love, sense of purpose and meaning, and opportunities for leadership that had been denied him elsewhere. Fortunately, as Mr. Rodríguez recalls in his memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., a makeshift center for Latino youth was established in his neighborhood. Its director believed that the intensity Latino kids sought on the street could be turned into a passion for learning, and for social justice. His faith in Luis Rodríguez helped give Mr. Rodríguez faith in himself—a transformation made vivid in the following lines quoted from "The Calling," a poem he wrote at the age of sixteen:

The calling came to me
while I languished
in my room; while I
whittled away my youth
in jail cells
and damp barrio fields.

It brought me to life,
out of captivity,
in a street-scarred
and tattooed place
I called body.

It called me to war;
to be writer,
to be scientist
and march with the soldiers
of change.

That poem concludes Mr. Rodríguez’s first collection, Poems Across the Pavement, published in 1989. His second collection, The Concrete River, is dedicated to the community center director who gave the young Mr. Rodríguez a vision of alternatives to his crazy life: "who taught me the poetry of the fight, and the fight in the poetry."

Now forty-four and married, with four children and four grandchildren, and having won many of this country’s most prestigious literary prizes for his writing, Mr. Rodríguez believes his most important accomplishment is the years he has spent using poetry, stories, and his own history with every kind of audience to help them discover and hone the creative power of their own

voices. In his preface to his most recent collection of poems, Trochemoche (the Spanish word

for "helter-skelter," "pell mell," "all over the place"), he describes how his work in communities across the U.S. and in many countries south of the border can change lives, and how it feeds his own writing:

. . . You can find poetry in the cracks along a wall, in the faces of friends, in the palms of children—in the trochemoche of our manifold existence. As well as a means of expression, poetry is a way of knowledge, of participation in the world, of discovering, as Henry James charged, "the significance in all things."

A case in point is a series of weekly poetry workshops that Mr. Rodríguez conducted in Chicago at an arts-based shelter for homeless women—a project originally scheduled to conclude after six weeks but which ended up lasting four years. He writes:

Mr. Rodríguez has brought this passion for self-discovery and social change through literature and storytelling to an array of groups as diverse in class and ethnicity nationally as he will find here in North Carolina. He has worked "behind thick-walled cells in the juvenile halls of Santa Cruz or Tucson" and in maximum security prisons in California and Connecticut; in classrooms in El Paso "held in cluttered storage rooms beneath aging bleachers" and "private schools along the mansion-strewn Main Line of Bryn Mawr"; in "the most over-crowded schools in the country (in East L.A.) and some of the most sparse (next to cornfields in Nebraska)"; "among Puerto Rican migrant workers in upstate New York and impoverished Southeast Asian youth in Fresno," on "rez’s such as the Quinault in Washington state and the Navajo in northeast Arizona"; "among poor white youth [the most neglected and underserved group in the country, he believes] in the depressed east Ohio coal-and-steel valleys" and "Mexican immigrant children in Chicago’s Pilsen barrio."

Mr. Rodríguez’s manifesto is this, again as stated in the preface to Trochemoche:

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