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Hotel Juárez wins PEN Oakland award

Hotel Juarez

HOUSTON, TX August 2014— The honors just keep coming! Author Daniel Chacón has been awarded the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature by PEN Oakland for Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops. Chartered in early 1989, PEN Oakland is a chapter of the Los Angeles based PEN USA, which falls under PEN International. The award ceremony will be held on Saturday, December 5, from 1-5pm, at the Rockridge Branch Library (5366 College Avenue, Oakland, CA 94618). Founded in London in 1921, PEN International’s mission is to promote works of excellence by writers of all cultural and racial backgrounds and to educate the public and media about the nature of multicultural work.

In this collection of short and flash fiction, misconceptions about people, the responsibility of the artist and conflicts about identity pepper stories that take place in the U.S. and abroad. In one story, a girl remembers her father, who taught her to love books and libraries. “A book can whisper at you, call at you from the shelves. Sometimes a book can find you. Seek you out and ask you to come and play,” he told her. Years later, she finds herself pulling an assortment from the shelves, randomly reading passages from different books and entering into the landscapes as if each book were a wormhole. In “Mais, Je Suis Chicano,” a Mexican American living in Paris identifies himself as Chicano, rather than American. “It’s not my fault I was born on the U.S. side of the border,” he tells a French Moroccan woman when she discovers that he really is American, a word she says “as if it could be replaced with murderer or child molester.”

Hotel Juárez has received rave reviews. It won first place in the Tejas Foco 2014 Fiction Awards given by the National Association for Chicana/o Studies and it was a finalist for the 2014 Balcones Fiction Prize given by the Balcones Center for Creative Writing at Austin Community College. According to NPR’s Alan Cheuse, “In seemingly effortless fashion, Chacón’s talent goes into play, his collection unfolding with sketches of life…sketches that [he] draws for us in unpretentious prose—all on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, all on the border between life and art.” Whether in Paris or Ciudad Juárez, Chacón reveals his characters at their most vulnerable in these powerful and rewarding stories, anti-stories and loops.

Daniel Chacón is the author of Unending Rooms (Black Lawrence Press, 2008), winner of the Hudson Prize; and the shadows took him (Washington Square Press, 2005) and Chicano Chicanery (Arte Público Press, 2000). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Lengua Fresca: Latinos Writing on the Edge (Mariner Books, 2006), Caliente: The Best Erotic Writing in Latin American Fiction (Berkley Trade, 2002) and Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the West Side of the Missouri (University of Texas Press, 2009). He is co-editor of The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: The Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga (University of Arizona Press, 2008).

Arte Público Press is the nation’s largest and most established publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by U.S. Hispanic authors.  Its imprint for children and young adults, Piñata Books, is dedicated to the realistic and authentic portrayal of the themes, languages, characters, and customs of Hispanic culture in the United States. Based at the University of Houston, Arte Público Press, Piñata Books and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project provide the most widely recognized and extensive showcase for Hispanic literary arts and creativity.  For more information, please visit our website at www.artepublicopress.com.