Rio Hondo College Division of Co

Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia [alurista] is the oldest of six in the family and has lived in various parts of Mexico and the United States. San Diego is where he is from now. He graduated from San Diego High School in 1965 and that summer enrolled at Chapman College, two years later thought better of it, transferred to San Diego State College where he taught Chicano Culture and Thought and Creative Writing. His education has been in life, philosophy, psychology, Latin American Studies and in la escuela del movimiento . . . Neither recluse, nor patron, Alurista is among the many who live the struggle daily. He doesn't wish, speculate, criticize, nor lament; he organizes, in the fullest sense of the word."

"I was the first modern Chicano writer who dared send bilingual work to an editor . . . All that was needed was for someone to get the nerve . . . and say this is the way I think, the way I write, this is the way the people write and think, this is how they speak."

- Alurista, from Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview

alurista papers--click here More on alurista--click here

Special guest: Can you guess?

9:40 a.m. Wray Theater

Ruben Martinez

Rubén Martínez is an award-winning journalist, author and musician. He joined the Creative Writing Program as an associate professor in 2002, leading both graduate and undergraduate workshops in non-fiction as well as developing “modern thought” courses that deal with mixed-genre writing, public intellectualism, post-colonial literature, and disapora.
His essays, opinions and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Salon, Village Voice, The Nation, Spin, Sojourners, and Mother Jones, among others. As a political commentator, he has appeared on ABC's Nightline and Politically Incorrect, PBS's Frontline, NPR’s All Things Considered, and on CNN. He is an associate editor for Pacific News Service and is a former news editor of the L.A. Weekly.

He has received a Lannan Foundation fellowship, a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, a Freedom of Information Award from the ACLU, a Greater Press Club of Los Angeles Award of Excellence, and an Emmy Award for hosting PBS-affiliate KCET-TV’s Life & Times.

As a musician, Martínez has been featured on albums by Concrete Blonde, Los Illegals, and the Roches, and he is currently at work on a solo album.

The New Americans (The New Press, 2004)
Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Picador, 2002)
Eastside Stories (with Joseph Rodriguez, Powerhouse Books, 1998)
The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (Vintage, 1993)

Wiki Page

11:15 a.m. Wray Theater

Jack Grisham

Jack Grisham is an author, musician, and sober coach. His book An American Demon will be released on ECV Press. Currently with T.S.O.L., Jack is an internationally known musician with over 14 full length records released and hundreds of singles and compilation recordings. Jack has appeared as himself in the films: Let it Rok, Suburbia, Rage, American Hardcore, Punk's Not Dead, and many others. He has also appeared as a guest on Mentor and TV's Sober House.

Jack maintains a Sober Coaching practice from his offices in Huntington Beach, CA

An American Demon is Jack Grisham’s story of depravity and redemption, terror and spiritual deliverance. While Grisham is best known as the raucous and provocative front man of the pioneer hardcore punk band TSOL (True Sounds of Liberty), his writing and true life experiences are physically and psychologically more complex, unsettling, and violent than those of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk.

Eloquently disregarding the prefabricated formulas of the drunk–to–sober, bad–to–good tale, this is an entirely new kind of life lesson: summoned through both God and demons, while settling within eighties hardcore punk culture and its radical–to–the–core (and most assuredly non–evangelical) parables, Grisham leads us, cleverly, gorgeously, between temporal violence and bigger-picture spirituality toward something very much like a path to salvation and enlightenment. An American Demon flourishes on both extremes, as a scary hardcore punk memoir and as a valuable message to souls navigating through an overly materialistic and woefully self–absorbed “me first” modern society.

An American Demon conveys anger and truth within the perfect setting, using a youth rebellion that changed the world to open doors for this level of brash destruction. Told from the point of view of a seminal member of the American Punk movement — doused in violence, rebellion, alcoholism, drug abuse, and ending with beautiful lessons of sobriety and absolution — this book is as harrowing and life–affirming as anything you’re ever going to read.

* Distinguished Performing Artist Award

* An American Demon, reviewed

* TSOL: 'Beneath the Shadows" (1982)