Roberta Fernández
Roberta Fernández | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Texas at Austin (BA, MA) University of California, Berkeley (PhD) |
| Period | 1990–present |
| Genre | Composite novel, short story cycle |
| Notable works | Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories |
| Notable awards | Multicultural Publisher's Exchange, Best Fiction (1991) Texas Institute of Letters |
 Literature portal | |
Roberta Fernández is a Tejana novelist, scholar, critic and arts advocate. She is known for her novel Intaglio and for her work editing several award-winning women writers. She was a professor in Romance languages & literatures and women's studies at the University of Georgia.[1]
Biography[edit]
Early life and education[edit]
![[icon]](/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small} | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (June 2008) |
Fernández is a fifth-generation tejana from Laredo, Texas. She earned her B.A. and an M.A. degrees at the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD in Romance Languages & Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, "Towards a Contextualization of José Carlos Mariátegui's Concept of Literary and Cultural Nationalism,"[1] examined the role of José Carlos Mariátegui in the early 20th century Peruvian cultural wars.
Fernandez held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin. She received a Rockefeller Fellowship from the Womanist Consortium of the Institute of African American Studies at University of Georgia to study Chicana literary feminism and nationalism.[1] She received a second Rockefeller Fellowship from the CRIM (Centro Regional de Investigacion Multidisciplinarias), a research center in Cuernavaca associated with the National University of Mexico.[citation needed] The seminar topic for 2005 was "The Empowerment of Women." Her own topic dealt with "The Role Played by Community-Based Organizations in the Transculturation Process & Empowerment of Mexican Women Recently Arrived in Georgia."[citation needed]
Art advocacy[edit]
- Assistant to the Director, Mexican Museum in San Francisco
- Director, Bilingual Arts Program, Oakland Unified School District
- Founder, Prisma: A Multicultural, Multilingual Women's Literary Review (1979–1982) at Mills College
- Directed two major conferences: "The Cultural Roots of Chicana Literature, 1780-1980" (Mills College and Aztlán Cultural, 1981; see here for photo of the exhibit's poster) and "Latinos in the United States: Cultural Roots and Diversity" (Brown University and Casa Puerto Rico, 1985).[1]
Editorial and curatorial work[edit]
- Editor, Arte Público Press, from 1990 to 1994. Several of the writers whose manuscripts she edited received national awards for these works.
- Curator, "Twenty-Five Years of Hispanic Literature of the United States, 1965-1990" (traveling exhibit), sponsored by the Texas Humanities Resource Center.[1]
Published works[edit]
- Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories (1990)
- Fronterizas: Una novela en seis cuentos (the author's own re-write into Spanish of Intaglio) (2002)
- In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, ed. (1994; anthology)[2]
- Fiesta, Fe y Cultura: Religious Celebrations of the Mexican Community of Detroit, [Roberta Fernandez, Spanish editor and translator], Laurie Sommers, ed. (1995)
- Twenty-five Years of Hispanic Literature in the United States, (a catalogue of a library exhibit of the same name) at the Main Library of the U of Houston, 2 November 1992 – 14 January 1993).
- Some of her short fiction and essays have appeared in Riding Low in the Streets of Gold, Judith Ortiz Cofer, ed.; Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, Nicolas Kanellos, ed.; American 24-Karet Gold: Classic American Short Stories, Yvonne Colliud Sisko, ed.; Breve: Actualite de la Nouvelle (Paris), Martine Couderc, ed. & trans.; Barrios and Borderlands: Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, Denis Lynn Daly Heyck, ed.; Mascaras: Latina Writers on Their Own Work, Lucha Corpi, ed.; The Stories We Have Kept Secret, Carol Bruchac, ed.;The Massachusetts Review (Spring 1983); Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, Gomez, Moraga, Romo-Carmona, eds., and many more national and international publications.
- Some of her scholarly articles have appeared in as The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, Frances Aparicio & Suzanne Bost, eds. (2012); The Flannery O'Connor Review (Fall, 2009); Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature, Emmanuel Nelson, gen. ed. (2006); 'Abriendo Caminos in the Brotherland: Chicana Feminism in El Grito ' in Chicana Leadership: The Frontier Reader, Sue Armitage et al., eds. (2002); 'La presencia de Jose Carlos Mariategui en el Repertorio Americano (Costa Rica, 1919–1959)' in Revista de Linguística y Filología de la Universidad de Costa Rica; Reconstructing American Literature, Paul Lauter (ed.); Women's Studies and in other publications.
Awards for creative writing[edit]
- Three-time DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest/MacDowell Fellow while a resident at the MacDowell Colony
- Multicultural Publisher's Exchange award, Best Fiction (1991), Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories
- Inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters (1991)
- Finalist for the Schweitzer Fellowship in Creative Writing at SUNY Albany—Toni Morrison, judge, 1987
- Finalist for the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship at the U of New Mexico, 1986
- Finalist for the Dobie/Paisano Fellowship of the Graduate School at the University of Texas in Austin, 1983
Scholarly awards[edit]
- Fulbright Senior Lecturer award: Department of English and American Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic (2006–2007)[3]
- Scholar-in-Residence (by invitation of the Athens-Clarke County Public Library): led five book discussions on Latino/a literature at four public libraries in Georgia through a pilot program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association, Oct 2001-June 2002
- Faculty Research Grant, Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia, Spring, 2001
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ a b c d e Arte Público Press bio page, accessed 9 March 2008 Archived 30 August 2006 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Roberta Fernández (1994). In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States. Arte Publico Press. ISBN 9781611921823.
- ^ UGA Institute for Women's Studies Newsletter(accessed March 2008) Archived 14 March 2008 at the Wayback Machine
Notes/Further reading[edit]
- Gómez-Vega, Ibis. "La mujer como artista en Intaglio." The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue, 1993 Jan-Apr; 18 (1): 14–22.
- Kelley, Margot. "A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre." Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Ed. Julia Brown. New York, NY: Garland; 1997. pp. 63–84.
- Muthyala, John Sumanth. "Roberta Fernández's Intaglio: Border Crossings and Mestiza Feminism in the Borderlands." Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Etudes Américaines, 2000; 30 (1): 92–110. (PDF online)
External links[edit]
- Texas Humanities Resource Center (scroll down), not part of Humanities Texas
- Texas Institute of Letters
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
Categories:
- 20th-century American novelists
- American writers of Mexican descent
- American academics of Mexican descent
- American feminists
- Living people
- University of Texas at Austin alumni
- University of California, Berkeley alumni
- Hispanic and Latino American novelists
- American literary critics
- American women literary critics
- 21st-century American novelists
- Hispanic and Latino American short story writers
- American women novelists
- 20th-century American women writers
- 21st-century American women writers
- 20th-century American short story writers
- 21st-century American short story writers
- 20th-century American essayists
- 21st-century American essayists
- American women essayists
- Tejana feminists
- Tejano writers
- American women critics