This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

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This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Berkeley, Third Woman Press (2002).
by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color is a feminist anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. The anthology was first published in 1981 by Persephone Press, and the second edition was published in 1984 by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. The book was out in its third edition, published by Third Woman Press, until 2008, when its contract with Third Woman Press expired and it went out of print. This Bridge centered the experiences of women of color, offering a serious challenge to white feminists who made claims to solidarity based on sisterhood. Writings in the anthology, along with works by other prominent feminists of color, call for a greater prominence within feminism for race-related subjectivities, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism. This Bridge has become “one of the most cited books in feminist theorizing”.

Cherríe L. Moraga is playwright, poet, and essayist whose plays and publications have received national recognition, including a TCG Theatre Artist Residency Grant in 1996, the NEA’s Theatre Playwrights’ Fellowship in 1993, and two Fund for New American Plays Awards.  In 2007, she was awarded the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature; in 2008, a Creative Work Fund Award,  and in 2009, a Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwiting.

Moraga is the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which won the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1986.   She is the author of the now classic Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983/2003) and The Last Generation (1993), published by South End Press of Cambridge, MA.  In 1997, she published a memoir on motherhood entitled Waiting in the Wings (Firebrand Books) and is completing a memoir on the subject of Mexican American cultural amnesia entitled Send Them Flying Home:  A Geography of Remembrance.  This year Moraga also completed a new collection of writings —   A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness:  Writings 2000-2010, published by Duke University Press in 2011.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) was a scholar of Chicana cultural, feminist, and queer theory. Her most well-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is on her life growing up on the Mexican-Texas border and incorporated her lifelong feelings of social and cultural marginalization into her work.

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