Michele serros biography
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Writer Michele Serros dies at 48
I used to know Michele Serros — who died of cancer Sunday at her home in Berkeley at the age of 48 — a little bit. In the mids she and I, along with a bunch of other people, helped launch PEN in the Classroom, a program to put writers together with under-served students in Los Angeles-area high schools.
For Serros this was an unlikely homecoming. Growing up in Oxnard, she found herself on the outside looking in. “We never said we lived in Oxnard,” she once explained of her family. “We always said we lived between Malibu and Santa Barbara.”
What makes such a line so telling is that it sets up the tensions and the oppositions, as well as the sharp sense of humor, that occupied the center of Serros’ work. There’s a reason, after all, that her first book — published in , while she was a UCLA undergraduate — was called “Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard,” a titled inspired by a high school classmate called La Letty, who “had a strong definition of what a Chicana was.”
In a Los Angeles Times profile, Serros explained the conflict: “Here I was in school thinking maybe I’d go to college and become a writer. My Spanish was horrible, I wore Vans to school and La Letty was like ‘What a Chicana falsa you are.’ ”
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Michele Serros
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Michele Serros was still a student at Santa Monica City College , when her first book of poetry and short stories, Chicana Falsa and other stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard, was published. When the original publisher of Chicana Falsa went out of business, Michele continued to sell copies from her garage. In , Riverhead Books reissued Chicana Falsa and as well as Serros' latest collection of fiction, How to be a Chicana Role Model . The latter instantly became a Los Angeles Times Best Seller and both publications are currently used as required reading in U.S. high schools and universities.
Named by Newsweek as "one of the top young women to watch for in the new century," Serros has been a featured contributor for the Los Angeles Times' children's fiction section and a commentator for National Public Radio (Morning Edition, Weekend All Things Considered, Anthem, Along for the Ride, Latino USA). In addition to being an award-winning poet, Michele has read her poems to stadium crowds of 25,+ for Lollapalooza, recorded Selected Stories from Chicana Falsa for Mercury Records and was selected by the Poetry Society of America to have her poetry placed on
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