Carla Trujillo: January Portrait of the Month

Carla Trujillo, 1996

Carla Trujillo was born in Las Vegas, New Mexico and grew up in Northern California. She received a B.S. in human development from the University of California Davis and an M.S. and Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her dissertation centered on assessing the use of differential treatment of underrepresented students in college classrooms. She is the editor of Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991). Now in its third printing, the anthology won the Lambda Book Award for Best Lesbian Anthology and the Out/Write Vanguard Award for Best Pioneering Contribution to the field of Gay/Lesbian Lifestyle Literature. Trujillo is also the editor of Living Chicana Theory (1998), an anthology of Chicana feminist theory. She has written several short stories, as well as articles on identity, sexuality, and higher education. What Night Brings, Trujillo’s first novel, was published by Curbstone Press in 2003 and won the Miguel Mármol prize for Latino/a fiction focusing on human rights. The book addresses domestic abuse in a Chicano working-class family living in California during the 1960s. It also earned the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Latino Literary Foundation Latino Book Award, Bronze Medal from Foreword Magazine, Honorable Mention for the Gustavus Meyers Books Award, and was a Lambda Book Award finalist. She is Director of the Graduate Diversity Program at the University of California Berkeley and has focused her recent activities on using interactive theater to improve the classroom climate for underrepresented students. She has lectured in ethnic studies at U.C. Berkeley and Mills College and in Women’s Studies at San Francisco State University. In 2010, Trujillo joined the Lambda Literary Foundation’s board.