Anel Ivonne Flores

 

E-mail: tequilanel@gmail.com                         Myspace: www.myspace.com/redrainheart

La Rio Grande Naranja 2006

Holding her BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing, Texas border-born lesbiana, writer, educator and multidisciplinary artista believes access to arte and expression creates a channel towards healing, understanding and empowerment for all people, and thus a vehicle for social justice.  She is author of novel, Lady Empanada: A Lesbiana’s Story en Probaditas (awaiting publication) and play, Empanada, produced nationally at such venues as the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, MECA in Houston, the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, the University of Texas, Trinity University and in various national art festivals. Additionally, Empanada fostered the study of her critical examination between food, sexuality, feminism and lesbianidad by Associate Professors at the University of Texas-San Antonio, California State University, Kenyon College, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.  Her short stories, poems and essays can be found in such anthologies as Sinister Wisdom 74: Latina Lesbians, Queer Codex: Rooted, Revolution: The Reclaiming of Tradition and Voice, and Mother Tongues: A Literary Exchange.  Earlier literary works and visual art were unearthed in the Lodestar Quarterly, iungo Arts Magazine, The Pitkin Literary Review published with Goddard College, the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center’s La Voz, Scarcely Scholarly, and the University of Incarnate Word’s Literary Magazine, Quirk. Throughout the last 13 years she has work-shopped and studied under authors, Gloria E. Anzaldua, Sharon Bridgforth, Mariana Romo-Carmona, Sandra Cisneros, Carla Trujillo, Leslie Larson, Alex Espinoza and Elena Georgiou.  As an educator, she has developed a method of facilitating creative writing, memory realization and story telling called Painting Down the Word, and taught it to inner city youth as a public school teacher, to incarcerated youth, students in community college, and for community in cultural arts centers such as Gemini Ink, MECA and others. She has served as a Board Member of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center for the last seven years while also being an active Buena Gente at the center for fifteen years; offering writing, performance and art workshops to the LGBTQ community, organizing with the Free Speech Coalition, participating in the Oral History Project, curating Visual Art Exhibits, Performances, Marches and Platicas.   Other memberships include: the Macondo Writers Workshop, Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldua, the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Scholars, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture.  Her awards include being supported and accepted to La Pena’s Hecho en Califas annual Arts Festival and to the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s Leadership Institute.  Currently she is seeking publication for Lady Empanada and doing research in South Texas towards completing a novel that tells the stories of five generations of women living on the Texas border from the time of the Mexican War to today, titled Tiempo Olvidado: That Time Forgot.  The novel is told through conversations between Solitaria, a thirty-something year old lesbiana living presently, and the spirit of her Mexican great-great grandmother who resurrects to explain why the women in her family are wrapped in such oppressive traditional practices.   Tiempo Olvidado reveals the secret of why a Mexican woman married an American Soldier, why another lived and played among the chemically toxic Hayes-Sammons Factory, why another was white, red-headed and blue-eyed, and how these and many other discoveries instill the resistance Solitaria needs to survive within her stagnant sexually oppressive cultura, but still honor her ancestors’ story.