Diana Garcia is a native of California's San Joaquin
Valley.
She was born in Camp CPC, a farm labor
camp owned by the California Packing Corporation.
At different times, she has been a single mother
on welfare, an electronics retail store
owner, a personnel manager, and a sentencing consultant
to criminal defense attorneys.
She received her MFA from San Diego State University
and has taught at Central Connecticut State
University and University of Freiburg in Freiburg, Germany.
Garcia now teaches at California State University, Monterey Bay,
where she is acting director of Creative Writing and Social
Action program, and where she coordinates
the Reading, Writing, and Critical Thinking
program for the Institute for Human Communication.
Her poetry and fiction are included
in several anthologies, among them Touching the Fire--
Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance
and Pieces of the Heart--
New Chicano Fiction.
Her collection of poetry, When Living
Was a Labor Camp, published by the University of Arizona
Press, was selected as an American Book Award winner
by the Before Columbus Foundation.
In the preface to her book, Diana Garcia
begins, "My poems begin at 5:00 in the morning, any weekday
morning between February and November
in the middle of California's San Joaquin Valley."
She is a storyteller leading us through the valley
to the rich lives of the characters, archetypes
and intimates both, who populate her poems.
Garcia prods her personal history
and discovers the beauty, the strength,
and the resolve of Southern California's migrant workers.
She also uncovers the indignities
they suffer by way of American policy--
the Repatriation Act of the 1930s, Operation Wetback
of the 1950s, more recently, Propositions 187 and 227
in California.
Garcia's poetry also takes on the intellectual.
She invokes, for instance, the French theorist Héléne Cixous
and Gaston Bachelard.
But even as these philosophical underpinnings
provide a powerful structure, Garcia goes a step further.
She covers her intellectual brush strokes
with approachable syntax and resonant colloquial language.
She leaves us with a generous offering--
the polish of her imagery and the mastery of her music.
Please welcome Diana Garcia.
[APPLAUSE]