Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, essayist, and playwright whose professional life began in 1981 with her coeditorship of the avant-garde feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000–2010 and the memoirs—Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood and Native Country of the Heart. Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, a Lambda Literary Foundation award and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award among many other honors. As a dramatist, her awards include an NEA, two Fund for New American Plays Awards, and the PEN/West Award. Moraga is a Distinguished Professor in the department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where, with her partner Celia Herrera Rodríguez, she co-founded Las Maestras Center for Xicana/x Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Praxis.