Author, playwright, director and longtime queer Chicana activist Cherríe Moraga has been a social, cultural and political instigator of the finest sort since the early 1980s when she famously collaborated with Gloria Anzaldúa to co-edit This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a volume that remains a central point of intellectual and affective reference in numerous fields. Moraga is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and co-founder and co-director, with Cecilia Herrera Rodríguez, of Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Praxis, also based at UCSB.

"The Bookends of My Life," a reading with commentary

Moraga’s most recent publications, Waiting in the Wings (to be re-issued in 2022) and Native Country of the Heart (2019)—written nearly twenty-five years apart—together form a deeply personal portrait of the writer’s intersubjective life as a queer mother and queer daughter.  These memoirs were catalyzed, respectively, by the 1993 imperiled birth of Moraga’s son, Rafael, and the 2005 “demented” passing of her mother, Elvira Moraga.  They serve as an extended meditation on death and dying, which integrates a decolonial non-western and indigenous feminist perspective, as they also mark the political hour of the last half of the twentieth century.

The William T. Patten Foundation

The William T. Patten Foundation provides funds to bring distinguished scholars or practitioners in the sciences, the humanities and the arts to the Bloomington campus for a week. The foundation has brought over 150 scholars of extraordinary national and international distinction since 1937, making it the oldest lecture series at Indiana University. Lecturers are chosen by a campus-wide faculty committee.

William T. Patten graduated in 1893 with a Bachelor of Arts in history from IU. He then moved to Indianapolis and led a successful career in real estate and politics. He created an endowment for the university in 1931, with the purpose of bringing renowned leaders to the Bloomington campus.

 

 

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