With Special Issue Distinguished Editor: Dr. Stephanie Fetta
In 1974, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine began funding the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize which would award over 30 yearly award prizes in the rotating categories for best novel, poetry collection, theater/drama, and short story collection. The prize would go on to recognize some of the most iconic names in Chicanx and Latinx literature today, including Ron Arias, Gary Soto, Rosaura Sánchez, Alma Villanueva, Helena María Viramontes, Juan Felipe Herrera, Luis J. Rodriguez, Lucha Corpi, Francisco X. Alarcón, Cherrié Moraga, Graciela Limón, Mary Helen Ponce, Benjamín Alire Saenz, Jo Ann Y. Hernández, and Andrés Montoya.
The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize was founded by Juan Villegas, professor of theater at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and later directed by faculty from the same department including the recognized academics in the field, Alejandro Morales, María Herrera Sobek, and Juan Bruce Novoa.
Every year, the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize would invite a recognized author to participate as honorary prize judge. Previous judges included Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, and Rolando Hinojosa. The winning entries were awarded publication by Arte Público Press and a monetary prize.
Because of its prestige, tradition, and judging panel, and because submissions were open and free to the public, the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize was an excellent opportunity for the blooming Chicanx and Latinx literary community across the country and throughout the years.
Unfortunately, like all good things, the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize came to a close in the mid 2000s due to a lack of funding. The year 2024 would have marked the 50th anniversary of the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize, and instead of celebrating literature, culture, and Chicanx and Latinx publishing, we are left with the memory of what was.
But, we decided no quedarnos con las manos cruzadas.
In honor of the many years of its existence, as well as the many people who had the privilege of becoming a part of it, we, the editors of Latin@ Literatures would like to recognize the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize at 50, by dedicating our second Special Issue to commemorating the legacy of the prestigious literary award.
We are also very happy to announce the participation of Dr. Stephanie Fetta, the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize anthologist, as the Special Issue Distinguished Editor.
We hereby call for submissions for our second Special Issue in the following topics:
- The Legacy of Chicano/Latino Literary Prize.
- Chicanx / Latinx Anthologies, Past, Present, and Future.
- ¿Dónde están ahora?: Micro-biographies about CLLP contest winners.
- Literary Analyses, Critiques, Reviews, and other Academic Works pertaining to previous CLLP winning entries and authors.
- Interviews with former contest winners, participants, judges, and CLLP contest directors.
- Literary Prizes and Latinxs. Cartographies of the Field and Personal Tales of Triumph and Struggle.
- Navigating the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize Anthology.
- Guidance counseling for Latinx authors and what to do in case of emergency.
Please submit all materials following our general guidelines listed on our website by Dec. 31, 2023 to info@latinoliteratures.org.
And, just in case you were wondering, here is a list of past Chicano/Latino Literary Prize winners.
Dr. Stephanie Fetta is the Director for the Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latino Studies at UMass Amherst and the author of The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (Arte Público Press, 1998). Dr. Fetta won the 2019 MLA book award for Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature. Dr. Fetta is currently working on her second monograph investigating the symmetries and tensions between texts by Zapotec writers living in the United States, contemporary Mexican indigenous writing, and US Latin@/x cultural production. She advances the soma in rhetorical modes of indigenous texts she finds in all three corpuses in assonance with Western modes of storytelling. Dr. Fetta suggests the aesthetic of indigenous soma writing the most successful in exposing the colonial legacy in lived experience.