From  Luis Rodriguez

Luis J. Rodriguez (born 1954) is an American poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and columnist. He is the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate. He is recognized as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, and has received various awards for his work. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, among others. It has been the subject of controversy when included on reading lists in California, Illinois, Michigan, and Texas schools due to its frank depictions of gang life.

Rodriguez has also founded or co-founded numerous organizations, including the Tía Chucha Press, which publishes the work of unknown writers, Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural, a San Fernando Valley cultural center, and the Chicago-based Youth Struggling for Survival, an organization for at-risk youth.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Luis was an active gang member and drug user in East Los Angeles, developing a long rap sheet. However, his criminal activity did not preclude his participation in the Chicano Movement, and he joined the 1968 East L.A. walkouts and took part in the August 31, 1970 Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War. At the moratorium, he was brutalized and arrested along with numerous other peaceful protesters.

In 1972, he painted several murals in the San Gabriel Valley communities of Rosemead and South San Gabriel. Although Luis dropped out of high school at 15, he later returned and graduated from Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra, where he led school walkouts and became president of To Help Mexican American Students (TOHMAS). He later attended California State University, Los Angeles briefly from 1972–1973, becoming a member of the Chicano activist group MEChA, but eventually dropped out.

The two currents in his life came to an inevitable head when at the age of 18, a sentence imposed for a criminal conviction was mitigated by letters of support from community members who saw his potential. Feeling a sense of indebtedness to those who had helped him, he decided to quit drugs and the gang life and dedicate himself to community organizing. Luis also focused on political study and organization, including running for Los Angeles School Board in 1977. In addition, he worked as a bus driver, truck driver, in construction, a paper mill, a lead foundry, a chemical refinery, and a steel mill, learning the millwright trade, carpentry, maintenance mechanics, and welding.

At the same time, Luis helped with various gang peace truces and urban peace efforts throughout the L.A. area. In 1980, he began attending night school at East Los Angeles College, and working as a photographer for several area publications. That summer he attended a workshop for minority journalists at UC Berkeley, after which he covered crime and other urban issues for the San Bernardino Sun.

At the same time, he continued to be active in East Los Angeles, leading a group of barrio writers and publishing ChismeArte, a Chicano art journal, out of an office at Self Help Graphics & Art. He began facilitating writing workshops and talks in prisons and juvenile lockups in 1980 starting in Chino Prison. In the early 1980s, he also worked for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in public radio, and as a freelance journalist until he moved to Chicago in 1985.

In Chicago he was editor of the People’s Tribune for three years, then a typesetter for the Liturgy Training Publications of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and a writer/reporter for WMAQ-AM, All News Radio. Luis became active in the Chicago poetry scene, birthplace of the Poetry Slam, and founded Tia Chucha Press to publish his first book “Poems Across the Pavement.” His readings and talks extended to prisons around the country as well as homeless shelters, migrant camps, Native American reservations, public & private schools, colleges, universities, libraries, and conferences.

In 1993, Curbstone Press of Willimantic, CT published Luis’s first memoir, Always Running as a cautionary tale for his son Ramiro, who joined a Chicago street gang at the age of fifteen. In 1994, Luis became a poet/teacher for men’s conferences sponsored by the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, founded by mythologist/storyteller Michael Meade, and co-founded Youth Struggling for Survival (YSS) to work with gang and non-gang youth and their families.

In 1998, Rodriguez received the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature among other awards for his writing and community work such as the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a PEN Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Lannan Poetry Fellowship, a Poetry Center Book Award of San Francisco State University, a Paterson Poetry Prize, and more. In 2000, Luis moved his family, then consisting of his third wife Trini and their two young sons, Ruben and Luis, to the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. His daughter Andrea and his granddaughter Catalina later joined them.

In 2001, Luis helped create Tia Chucha’s Cafe Cultural in Sylmar CA with his wife Trini and their brother-in-law Enrique Sanchez, and in 2003 the nonprofit Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Bookstore with Angelica Loa Perez and Victor Mendoza. In 2005, he brought Tia Chucha Press, now a renown small press with more than 50 books of cross-cultural poets, to Los Angeles. Over the years, Luis received other recognition, including the Spirit of Struggle/Ruben Salazar award from InnerCity Struggle and as an “Unsung Hero of Compassion,” presented by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.