Oral History Interview, Carla Trujillo (1504)

Abstract

Carla Trujillo was born to a working class family in New Mexico and grew up in Northern California. Her extended family and roots are New Mexican (Chicana). She received her B.S. degree in Human Development from UC Davis, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her dissertation focused on assessing differential treatment of underrepresented students in college classrooms. She is the editor of Living Chicana Theory and Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Third Woman Press), winner of a Lambda Book Award and the Out/Write Vanguard Award. Her first novel, What Night Brings (Curbstone Press 2003), won the Miguel Marmol prize focusing on human rights. What Night Brings also won the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Latino Literary Foundation Latino Book Award, Bronze Medal from Foreword Magazine, Honorable Mention for the Gustavus Meyers Books Award, and was a LAMBDA Book Award finalist. Carla has also written various articles on identity and higher education. Her latest novel, Faith and Fat Chances, was a finalist for the 2012 PEN Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction and is forthcoming from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press. Carla works as the Assistant Dean for Graduate Diversity Program at U.C. Berkeley and has focused some of her recent activities on improving the work and classroom climate using Interactive Theater. She has lectured in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley and Mills College, and in Women’s Studies at S.F. State University. She has also taught fiction for the Sandra Cisneros Macondo Writers Program and the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writers Program.