Carla Trujillo

Carla (Mari) Trujillo is an American fiction writer, noted for her first novel What Night Brings, about the cultural contradictions of a Chicana lesbian growing up in a Catholic home. She is an administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught courses in Women's Studies.

Early life Trujillo was born in New Mexico, and lived there for several years before moving to Northern California. There, her grandmother ran a grocery store in the town of Las Vegas where Trujillo spent many days as a child playing. Trujillo would later use these early memories as inspiration for her works such as Faith and Fat Chances and Dogtown which both carry messages about class struggle and the impact of gentrification. Her grandmother's store was eventually claimed as eminent domain and paved over to make way for a highway, which meant the loss of income she used to support her seven children. She has lectured on Ethnic Studies, both at U.C. Berkeley and also Mills College in Oakland, California. She has also taught courses in Women's Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the former Director of the Graduate Diversity Program at U.C. Berkeley. Through the fictionalized account of Cruz, Trujillo questions issues of patriarchy and homophobia within Chicana/o culture.

Editorial work In 1991, Trujillo embarked on editing for Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, an anthology of poems, interviews, essays, short stories and personal testimonials written by Chicana lesbian writers and divided into four thematic sections: The life, The desire, The color, and The struggle . Out of the 44 literary pieces within, Trujillo included one of her essays titled Chicana Lesbians: Fear and Loathing in the Chicano Community. Her inspiration for editing Chicana Lesbians came from the work of other anthologies; Trujillo noted that reading Juanita Ramos's Compañeras: Latina Lesbians motivated her to expand upon the knowledge of Chicana Lesbian experiences. As she later explained in the introduction of Chicana Lesbians, she "wanted to see more about the intricacies and specifics of lesbianism and our culture," for her this meant incorporating writings which discussed issues such as racism and familial rejection of identity. Chicana Lesbians would later be awarded with the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Anthology.

Book cover symbolism Both book covers were chosen by Trujillo to represent the point and themes of the anthology. This resulted in the establishment of academic conferences centered around these movements, one of importance being the National Association for Chicano Studies conference in 1990. The conflict at this conference created the context from which Chicana Lesbians would be published.

Awards Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Anthology for Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991, won - editor) PEN Bellwether Prize for Faith and Fat Chances (2012 - Finalist)