Cherríe Moraga will be the keynote speaker for our signature event, the Raquel Rubio Goldsmith Lecture in Ethnic, Gender & Transborder Studies, for Spring 2026 (April 30). The Goldsmith Lecture Is a public education event organized annually by the Ethnic, Gender, Transborder Studies & Sociology (EGTSS) Department at Pima Community College.

Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, essayist and playwright whose professional life began in 1981 with her co-editorship of the groundbreaking feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. The author of several collections of her own writings, including: A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Loving in The War Years, The Last Generation and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood, Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, among numerous other honors. As a dramatist, her awards include an NEA, two Fund for New American Plays Awards, and the PEN West Award. In 2017, Moraga’s most recent play, Mathematics of Love, premiered at Brava Theater Center in San Francisco. In the same year, she began her tenure as a Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where with her partner, visual artist Celia Herrera Rodriguez, she instituted Las Maestras Center for Xicane Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Praxis. Her most recent memoir, Native Country of the Heart, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019. In 2023, Haymarket Books published updated anniversary editions of Waiting in the Wings and Loving in the War Years.  In 2024, Moraga became a Distinguished Professor Emerita In English, UC Santa Barbara.

This year’s event will be combined with a luncheon fundraiser for student scholarships sponsored by the EGTSS Department. The lecture is named in honor of a founding faculty member of the college and of Mexican American Studies and Native American Studies at PCC. The luncheon lecture and fundraiser will be held on Thursday, April 30, 2026, 11:30am – 1:30pm at the University Park Marriott, Tucson, Arizona.