Luis J. Rodríguez

In 1954, 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 (Touchstone, 2012), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, and Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Curbstone Books, 1993), winner of the Carl Sandburg Award of the Friends of the Chicago Public Library.

Rodriguez’s books of poetry include My Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, 1989–2004 (Curbstone Books, 2005), winner of a 2006 Paterson Poetry Book Prize; Trochemoche (Curbstone Books, 1998); The Concrete River (Curbstone Books, 1991), which won a PEN West/Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence; and Poems Across the Pavement (Tía Chucha, 1989), which received San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center Book Award. His prose work includes From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer (Seven Stories, 2020). In May 1998, Curbstone Press published his first children’s book, titled América Is Her Name.

Rodriguez is also a journalist and critic and the founder of Tía Chucha Press, which publishes emerging, socially conscious poets. In 2014, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Rodríguez as the poet laureate of Los Angeles. Rodríguez currently resides in California and co-manages the Tía Chucha Cultural Center and Bookstore in the northeastern San Fernando Valley.