Roberta Fernández is a Tejana novelist, scholar, critic and arts advocate. She is known for her novel Intaglio, and for her work editing several award-winning women writers. She was a professor in Romance Languages & Literatures and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia.
Biography
Early life and education
Fernández is a fifth-generation tejana from Laredo, Texas. She earned her B.A. and an M.A. degrees at the University of Texas at Austin, and her PhD in Romance Languages & Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, "Towards a Contextualization of José Carlos Mariátegui’s Concept of Literary and Cultural Nationalism," examined the role of José Carlos Mariátegui in the early 20th century Peruvian cultural wars. Fernandez held a post-doctoral fellowship at the at UT, Austin; she received a Rockefeller Fellowship from the Womanist Consortium of the at UGA to study Chicana literary feminism and nationalism. She received a second Rockefeller Fellowship from the CRIM , a research center in Cuernavaca associated with the National University of Mexico. The seminar topic for 2005 was "The Empowerment of Women." Her own topic dealt with "The Role Played by Community-Based Organizations in the Transculturation Process & Empowerment of Mexican Women Recently Arrived in Georgia."
Art advocacy
Assistant to the Director, Mexican Museum in San Francisco
Founder, Prisma: A Multicultural, Multilingual Women's Literary Review at Mills College
Directed two major conferences: "The Cultural Roots of Chicana Literature, 1780-1980" and "Latinos in the United States: Cultural Roots and Diversity".
Editorial and curatorial work
Editor, Arte Público Press, from 1990–1994. Several of the writers whose manuscripts she edited received national awards for these works.
Curator, "Twenty-Five Years of Hispanic Literature of the United States, 1965-1990", sponsored by the Texas Humanities Resource Center.
Published works
Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories
Fronterizas: Una novela en seis cuentos
In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, ed.
Fiesta, Fe y Cultura: Religious Celebrations of the Mexican Community of Detroit, , Laurie Sommers, ed.
Twenty-five Years of Hispanic Literature in the United States,.
Some of her short fiction and essays have appeared in Riding Low in the Streets of Gold, Judith Ortiz Cofer, ed.; Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, Nicolas Kanellos, ed.; American 24-Karet Gold: Classic American Short Stories, Yvonne Colliud Sisko, ed.; Breve: Actualite de la Nouvelle, Martine Couderc, ed. & trans.; Barrios and Borderlands: Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, Denis Lynn Daly Heyck, ed.; Mascaras: Latina Writers on Their Own Work, Lucha Corpi, ed.; The Stories We Have Kept Secret, Carol Bruchac, ed.;The Massachusetts Review ; Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, Gomez, Moraga, Romo-Carmona, eds., and many more national and international publications.
Some of her scholarly articles have appeared in as The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, Frances Aparicio & Suzanne Bost, eds. ; The Flannery O'Connor Review ; Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature, Emmanuel Nelson, gen. ed. ; 'Abriendo Caminos in the Brotherland: Chicana Feminism in El Grito ' in Chicana Leadership: The Frontier Reader, Sue Armitage et. al, eds. ; 'La presencia de Jose Carlos Mariategui en el Repertorio Americano ' in Revista de Linguística y Filología de la Universidad de Costa Rica; Reconstructing American Literature, Paul Lauter ; Women’s Studies and in other publications.
Literary criticism on ''Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories''
Akins, Adrienne Viola. "'Each of Us Tell It As We See It': Memory and Story-Telling in Roberta Fernandez's Intaglio" Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 2010: 52 : 30–40.
Gómez-Vega, Ibis. "La mujer como artista en Intaglio." The Bilingual Review, 1993 Jan-April, 18 : 14–22.
Jameson, Misty L. "Roberta Fernandez’s Intaglio as Short Story Cycle." Lecture presented at the Aqui y Ahora Symposium on Latina/o Literature at the University of Georgia, November, 2001.
Kelly, Margot. "A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre." Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Julia Brown, Ed. New York: Routledge, 1997: 63–84.
McCracken, Ellen. In chapter on "Remapping Religious Space" in New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Post-Modern Ethnicity. Tucson: U of Arizona Press, 1999.
Muthyala, John Sermanth. "Roberta Fernández’s Intaglio: Border Crossings and Mestiza Feminism in the Border-Lands." Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines, 2000:30 ; 92-110.
Muthyala, John Sermanth. Reworlding America: Myth, History and Narrative. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.
Awards for creative writing
Three-time DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest/MacDowell Fellow while a resident at the MacDowell Colony
Multicultural Publisher's Exchange award, Best Fiction, Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories
