SCC Hagan Center Diversity Series Speaker: Luis Rodriguez Spokane Community College’s Hagan Center welcomes speaker Luis Rodriguez, author of It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, winner of a 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award, and Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., winner of a Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Rodriguez was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, where he and his family faced poverty and dicrimination. He was a gang member and drug user by age 12 experiences he reflects on in both memoirs. By the time Rodriguez was 18, he had lost 25 friends to gang violence, drug overdoses and suicide. In addition to his memoirs, he has written books of poetry and children’s books, including América Is Her Name, and is the founder of Tía Chucha Press, which aims to publish emerging socially conscious poets. In 2014, he was appointed poet laureate of Los Angeles by Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Luis J. Rodriguez talks with SPR s Chris Maccini
Born in El Paso, Texas, Luis J. Rodriguez grew up in Watts and East Los Angeles. A gang member and drug user at the age of twelve, by the time he turned eighteen, Rodríguez had lost twenty-five of his friends to gang violence, drug overdoses, shootings, and suicide. He’s the author of two award-winning autobiographical accounts of his experiences with gang violence and addiction,
It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing and Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.
Rodriguez is also the author of several other books of poetry and prose, including most recently,
When: Wed., April 14, 6:30-7:30 p.m. Free Spokane Community College’s Hagan Center for the Humanities has been delivering an impressive series of online speakers as part of its Diversity Dialogues: Conversations about Race and Equity. That continues this week with University of Washington history scholar Carlos Gil. He’s been teaching about the history of Latin America at the Seattle school for more than 30 years, and his SCC lecture focuses on his own family’s story as he explores Mexican immigration. He captured that story after he retired from full-time teaching when he published his 2012 book We Became Mexican American: How Our Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream. His expertise should make for a fascinating discussion of a population rarely in the spotlight in Spokane.
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