Poet, novelist, journalist, activist, and critic Luis J. Rodriguez was born in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley of East Los Angeles. He served as the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles from 2014–2016. Rodriguez is recognized as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, and has received numerous awards for his work. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, among others. Rodriguez has also founded or co-founded numerous organizations, including the Tía Chucha Press, which publishes the work of unknown writers, Tía Chucha's Centro Cultural, a San Fernando Valley cultural center, and the Chicago-based Youth Struggling for Survival, an organization for at-risk youth. Diana Marie Delgado’s debut poetry collection, Tracing the Horse, will be published by BOA Editions in the Fall of 2019. She is also the author of Late Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust (Center for Book Arts, 2015). She is a recipient of a 2017 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and has received grants and scholarships from Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, Letras Latinas, and Jack Jones Literary Retreat. Delgado holds a BA in Poetry from UC Riverside and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Ninth Letter, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Fourteen Hills. Her work is rooted in her experiences growing up in the Mexican-American community, and she is a member of the CantoMundo and Macondo writing communities. She is the Literary Director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
