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Aleida Rodríguez
(1953 - living) Cuba - U.S.A.

Aleida Rodríguez

Writer

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Aleida was born on a kitchen table in Guines, near Havana, Cuba. She moved to the United States when she was nine years old. One of 15,000 children in the early '60s airlifted out of Cuba under a covert mission called Operation Peter Pan, Aleida settled with a foster family in Springfield, Illinois.

She and her older sister were joined two years later by their parents. After living in the Midwest for five years, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Rodriguez has lived for more than 35 years.

Aleida became fascinated with language at an early age, when she learned to switch back and forth from Spanish to English. "I learned to scrutinize language," she states, "to search for the roots of words as a way to get a deeper hold."

She started writing in her teens. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, and her work has been published widely since 1974. Marilyn Hacker selected her first book of poems, Garden of Exile (1999), for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, then later won the PEN Center USA West 2000 Literary Award. In November 2000, Garden of Exile was also named to the "Tops of 2000" books list by the San Francisco Chronicle.

In March 2001, she embarked on a small Poets & Writers-sponsored book tour of Northern California, including the famed Lunch Poems series at UC Berkeley, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House in Carmel, and the Sacramento Poetry Center.

In addition to having completed her first collection of essays (Desire Lines, which title comes from the landscape design term for the worn footpaths strollers make when they veer off the formal paths), she has a poem in Another City, as well as in the April 2001 issue of Poetry Wales. In June 2001, a couple of her small personal essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Aleida lives in Los Angeles where she works as a freelance translator and editor and teaches the occasional workshop, and is co-sponsored by the Ethnic Studies Department.

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