Loving in the War Years
An updated edition combining two classic works of Chicana and queer literatures, with a new introduction by renowned writer and luminary, Cherríe Moraga.
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, this updated edition of Loving in the War Years combines Moraga’s classic memoir with The Last Generation: Poetry and Prose, originally published in 1993, along with additional writings from the late 1990s, The result is a synergy of signature works crucial to the development of the intersectional politics we know today.
Cherríe Moraga’s powerful memoir remains as urgent as ever. She explores the contradictions and complexities of her Chicana and lesbian identities, moving gracefully between poetry and prose, Spanish and English, personal narratives and political theory. Moraga recounts navigating the world largely as an outsider in her early years, circling the interconnected societies around her from a distant yet observant perspective. Ultimately, however, her writing serves as a bridge between her cultures, languages, family, and herself, enabling her to look inward to forge connections from what had heretofore been inaccessible parts of her interior world. A touchstone for artists and activists, the works combine to show how deep self-awareness and compassionate engagement with one’s radically changing surroundings are key to building global solidarity among people and political movements.
Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, essayist, and playwright whose professional life began in 1981 with her coeditorship of the avant-garde feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000–2010 and the memoirs—Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood and Native Country of the Heart. Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, a Lambda Literary Foundation award and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award among many other honors. As a dramatist, her awards include an NEA, two Fund for New American Plays Awards, and the PEN/West Award. Moraga is a Distinguished Professor in the department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where, with her partner Celia Herrera Rodríguez, she co-founded Las Maestras Center for Xicana/x Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Praxis.