Taken as a whole, Moraga’s body of work deals with a range of issues, including race and racialization, settler colonialism and decolonial thought and practice, gender, sexuality, class, the power of language, family, particularly forms of familial attachment that reinforce or transcend heterosexist norms, and belonging. What is perhaps most distinctive about virtually all her work is Moraga’s refusal to deal with these issues independently of one another. Rather, from the very beginning of her career, Moraga stressed the manifold nature of identity and, by extension, the manifold nature of oppression. Moraga’s prescient analysis was deeply intersectional, making her an essential voice in discussions and debates we have been having, in one form or another, for almost fifty years. While being critically incisive and astute, Moraga’s work is also always heartfelt and profoundly moving.

Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, among other honors. As a playwright, she has received two Fund for New American Plays Awards, the NEA’s Playwrights’ Fellowship, as well as a Drama-logue and Critics Circle Award, and the Pen West Award.

While at IU, Dr. Cherríe Moraga will be giving two lectures:

9/13  "Unbound Tongues," Radical Women of Color Feminism Revisited: 7:30 pm in the Presidents Hall, Franklin Hall

9/15 "The Bookends of My Life," a reading with commentary: 7:30 pm in the Presidents Hall, Franklin Hall