Hernández, Lisa

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Pasadena, CA. Office—Los Angeles City College, 855 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90029. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, editor, educator, and short-story writer. Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles, CA, instructor in English.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Chicano/Latino Literary Prize, University of California-Irvine, for Migrations and Other Stories.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Tina Benitez) Palabras Chicanas: An Undergraduate Anthology, Mujeres en Marcha (Berkeley, CA), 1988.

Migrations and Other Stories, Arte Publico Press (Houston, TX), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author and editor Lisa Hernández is an English instructor at Los Angeles City College. She is also a coordinator of literacy programs for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Hernández's fiction is showcased in her debut collection, Migrations and Other Stories. "Family secrets are at the heart of these eleven fine stories in Hernández's first collection," commented Hazel Rochman, writing in Booklist. In one story, protagonist Esmerelda finds that she has come to hate the weak and ineffective factory-worker husband she married in order to facilitate her immigration to America. In another, a daughter dutifully scatters her dead mother's ashes at the U.S./Mexico border, even as startling revelations about her mother's first true love loom in the background. In the title story, two California neighbors travel to Mexico, each for their own heartfelt reasons. Reynaldo returns to Mexico after several years in California, hoping to reconcile with his alienated daughter who was furious when he crossed the border into America to look for work. Reynaldo's traveling companion, a young woman, hopes to divest herself of an unwanted lover while taking in the Mexican culture and scenery and contemplating her own parents' long-ago border crossing. In "The Neighbor," seventy-nine-year-old Sarita is offended at the rough sexual relationship between two neighbors, whose sadistic affair she considers an insult to the gentle and considerate lovers she has known throughout her many years.

In assessing Hernández's fiction, a Publishers Weekly contributor concluded: "Short and affecting, Hernández's tales are as ardent as they are prosaic and unflinching."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 15, 2007, Hazel Rochman, review of Migrations and Other Stories, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2007, review of Migrations and Other Stories, p. 160.