DEFIANT DEVOTION: Celebrating the Courageous Careers of Sandra Cisneros, Linda Hogan, and Ishmael Reed
The Los Angeles Review of Books is proud to honor three leading lights of contemporary literature, Sandra Cisneros, Linda Hogan, and Ishmael Reed, for their fearless, inimitable prose and verse and their lifelong commitments to rearing young writers of all backgrounds and smoothing the path to publication for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous writers. Together, they have launched independent presses, forged workshops with groundbreaking pedagogical methods, and foregrounded environmental justice, and, in so doing, transformed not just the literary establishment and contemporary canons, but our priorities as members of a democratic society. We look to them as models for artistic integrity, self-awareness, and new ways of relating and drawing near to each other in our fragmented world.
Continuing our honorees’ legacies, LARB has created a sponsorship ticket program for the event that allows ticket buyers to fund the attendance of local high school students. This year, we’re partnering with Los Angeles–based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations WriteGirl and 826LA to match students in their creative writing programs with our sponsorship ticket holders. The students will be invited to join us virtually and pose questions to the honorees during the event’s Q&A segment.
This year’s event will also feature:
⬥ A special reading featuring our three honorees;
⬥ Tributes from acclaimed writers Alex Espinoza, Daisy Hernández, Chelsea T. Hicks, John Keene, Julian Lucas, Daniel Olivas, Mona Simpson, Deanne Stillman, and Luis Alberto Urrea;
⬥ An intimate interview with the honorees; and
⬥ An audience Q&A segment.
All attendees will receive a gift book bundle mailed to their homes featuring autographed copies of Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo (Sandra Cisneros), Solar Storms (Linda Hogan), and Mumbo Jumbo (Ishmael Reed).
Tickets are very limited. Your ticket benefits the Los Angeles Review of Books, a 501(c)(3) public service nonprofit, and is tax-deductible.
Unable to attend? Make a charitable contribution to LARB: Donate here.
A special thanks to Vintage Books and Scribner for their generous donations of books.
THE 2022 HONOREES
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, and 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, and taught at the University of Colorado, Institute of American Indian Arts, and 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 the founder of the Before Columbus Foundation and PEN Oakland, nonprofit 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, 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.
*Photo credits: Sandra Cisneros by Keith Dannemiller; Linda Hogan by Larry Henderson; Ishmael Reed by Jason Henry