Denise Chavez

Denise Chávez is a Performance writer, Novelist, Playwright, Teacher and Cultural!Activist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico.!She has roots in Far West Texas with her mother’s family and in Las Cruces, New Mexico with her father’s familyand has learned to love life, literature, and tacos in both places.

A true child of La Frontera, Chávez is the author of the new novel The King and Queen of Comezón, a border mystery/love story; the recent memoir A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture and the novels Loving Pedro Infante and Face of An Angel, as well as a short story collection, The Last of the Menu Girls. She has also published a children’s book, La Mujer Que Sabía El Idioma de Los Animales/The Woman Who Knew the Language of the Animals. She is currently working on several collections of stories, “The Febe Stories,” and “Beautiful English/El Ingles Tan Bonito,” as well as!doing research for a family memoir, “Río Grande Family.” An actor, Chávez has performed her one-woman shows, Novena Narrativas and El Muro/The Wall: A Chorus of Immigrant Women’s Voices throughout the U.S.

Chávez is the director of The Border Book Festival, a major national and regional book festival based at Casa Camino Real in Las Cruces. It is the longest running book festival in New Mexico, celebrating its "#th anniversary in "#$%. Denise, along with her husband, photographer Daniel Zolinsky, is currently creating Museo de La Gente—Museum of the People—in downtown Las Cruces on the historic Camino Real.!It will serve as an arts residency center, a resource library, a workshop and exhibit space as well as a venue for multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-ethnic literary, literacy, music and arts events for audiences of all ages and backgrounds.

Denise Chávez is the winner of various awards including!the Don Luis Leal Award in Chicano Literature given by the City of Santa Barbara, the Santa Barbara Book Festival, University of California, Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara City College, as well as the New Mexico Governor’s Award in Literature, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, and The AmericanBook Award.!

For more about Denise and her works, go to http://www.borderbookfestival.org/artists/denise_chavez.php