Writers Week is the longest-running, free literary event in California and features the most renowned authors of our day alongside those at the start of promising careers.
February 18, 2022
2022 LA Review of Books (LARB)– UCR Department of Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Awards
Sandra Cisneros, Linda Hogan and Ishmael Reed
Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, she is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts, the PEN/
Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. Cisneros is the author of two novels, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo; a collection
of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek; two books of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman; a children’s book, Hairs/Pelitos; a selected anthology of her own work, Vintage Cisneros; with Ester Hernández, Have You Seen Marie?, a fable for adults; A House of My Own, a memoir; and Puro Amor, a bilingual story that she also illustrated. Her most recent book, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo, a story in English and Spanish, was published in 2021. In September 2022, a new collection of poetry, Woman Without Shame, will be published by Knopf and in Spanish by Vintage Español. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and makes her living by her pen.
The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Culture Foundation, the Thoreau Prize from PEN, Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, teacher, and activist who has spent most of her life in Oklahoma and Colorado. Her fiction has garnered many honors, including a
Pulitzer Prize nomination and her poetry collections have received the American Book Award, Colorado Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award (twice), and a National Book Critics Circle nomination. A volunteer and consultant for wildlife rehabilitation and endangered species programs, Hogan has also published essays with the Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club. She has authored twenty books, taught for the University of Colorado, Institute of American Indian Arts, and at the Indigenous Education
Institute. She has been a speaker at the United Nations Forum and was a plenary speaker at the Environmental Literature Conference in Turkey. Her work is writing of literary quality that contains new Environmental and Indigenous Knowledge and Activism. It illuminates a Native spirituality that has endured.
Ishmael Reed is founder of the Before Columbus Foundation and PEN Oakland, non-profit organizations run by writers for writers. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, University of California’ Distinguished Emeritus Award, University of Buffalo’s Distinguished Alumni Award, a National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize nominations, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, four AUDELCO awards, and San Francisco LitQuake’s Barbary Coast Award. Awarded as Blues Songwriter of the Year from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame, his collaborations with jazz musicians for the past forty years were also recognized by SFJazz Center with his appointment, as San Francisco’s first Jazz Poet Laureate and in Venice, Italy, where he became the first Alberto Dubito International awardee, honored as “a special artistic individual who has distinguished himself through the most innovative creativity in the musical and linguistic languages.” A poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, songwriter, public media commentator, lecturer and publisher, and author of more than thirty books, he taught for over 35 years at the University of California and was honored as their Emeritus Professor Awardee of the Year in 2020. He recently taught for UC Berkeley and is a Distinguished Professor at California College of the Arts.