DEATH AT SOLSTICE by Lucha Corpi
BronzeWord Latino Virtual Book Tour Schedule
Nov 30 Richard Unloaded http://www.un-loaded.com
Dec 1 Mayra Calvani Latino Book Examiner http://www.examiner.com/x-6309-Latino-Books-Examiner
Dec 2 Terri Behind Brown Eyes http://right2write.blogspot.com/
Dec 3 Lara Rios Julia Amante http://juliaamante.blogspot.com
Dec 4 Anna The Sol Within http://www.thesolwithinanna.blogspot.com
Dec 7 Misa Chasing Heroes http://chasingheroes.com
Dec 8 Monie Reading With Monie http://www.readingwithmonie.com
Dec 9 Carol Book-lover carol http://bookluver-carol.blogspot.com
Dec 10 Tasha Heidenkind’s Hideaway http://heidenkind.blogspot.com/
Dec 11 Nilki Musings http://Nilkibenitez.blogspot.com
Book description:
Lucha Corpi’s new book, fourth in a series, has captured fans on both coast. Join us on the book tour that will reveal secrets about her writing process and learn how her mysterious PI came to be. This lady is amazing. From reading Greek tragedies to writing mysteries, Lucha Corpi’s life is as intriguing as her PI’s tangled adventures. Haven’t read Corpi? Then start with her first book in the series all the way through to this book for a ride of thrills.
Review of Death at Solstice
A great mini-review in LIBRARY JOURNAL just came in: Corpi, Lucha. Death at Solstice: A Gloria Damasco Mystery. Arte Publico. 2009. c.240p. ISBN 978-1-55885-547-2
In her fourth outing (after Black Widow’s Wardrobe), Chicana sleuth Gloria Damasco has no idea that the road to finding stolen jewelry in the wine country of California’s Shenandoah Valley will lead to murder, kidnapping, and great danger. Verdict Corpi has constructed a twisting story line that confounds her intelligent detective and the reader at every turn. This will please readers looking for a fast-paced tale with a Hispanic cultural background.
Series of Book by Lucha Corpi
#1 Corpi, Lucha, Cactus blood : a mystery novel Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, c1995.
#2 Corpi, Lucha, Black widow’s wardrobe Houston, TX : Arte Público Press, 1999.
#3 Corpi, Lucha, Crimson moon : a Brown Angel mystery Houston, Tex. : Arte Público Press, c2004 Civil rights movements
Author’s Bio
For Lucha Corpi, art has always meant activism. As a woman, a Hispanic, an immigrant and a mother, she has always found herself breaking down barriers in both life and literature.
Corpi was born in 1945 in Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico, a small tropical village on the Gulf of Mexico into a community that fostered creativity, performances and an appreciation for music, poetry and storytelling.
In 1964, she married and moved with her husband to Berkeley, California, a city in the throes of the students’ Free Speech Movement, which ignited the most turbulent decade in the history of the University of California-Berkley campus. It also coincided with the inception of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the southwestern United States.
Following an emotionally devastating divorce in 1970, Corpi found herself alone and in pain, with no family except her young son and very few friends. She turned to writing simply to get hold of her feelings, to face her contradictions and keep chaos at bay.
Her initial writing forays led to the exploration of poetry in Spanish as an outlet for her creativity. In 1970, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for poems later included in Palabras de mediodia / Noon Words (Fuego de Aztlán Publications, 1980; bilingual edition Arte Público Press, 2001). Her first collection of poems appeared in Fireflight: Three Latin American Poets (Oyes, 1976), and a third poetry collection followed: Variaciones sobre una tempestad / Variations on a Storm (Third Woman Press, 1990).
During that same decade, Corpi resumed her university studies, which had been interrupted by her marriage and supporting her husband while he studied. The UC-Berkeley campus provided an excellent forum for her political activism. Among other pursuits, Corpi was one of five founding members of the Aztlán Cultural, an arts service organization that years later would merge with Centro Chicano de Escritores (Chicano Writers Center). She also joined the Comité Popular Educativo de la Raza, an organization of parents, students and teachers in Oakland that sought to establish bilingual child care centers and other programs in the city’s unified school district.
After her first collection of poetry appeared, Corpi experienced a long and personally worrisome poetic silence. To ease the tension, she turned to prose, penning several award-winning short stories. In 1984, she wrote her first story in English and her first English-language novel, Delia’s Song, was published by Arte Público Press in 1989.
In 1990, Corpi was twice honored: she was awarded a Creative Arts Fellowship in fiction by the City of Oakland, and she was named poet laureate at Indian University Northwest.
The publication of Eulogy for a Brown Angel: A Mystery Novel (Arte Público Press, 1992) was the culmination of a life-long dream. The novel won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Best Book of Fiction. Corpi’s second mystery novel featuring Chicana detective Gloria Damasco is Cactus Blood (Arte Público Press, 1995), which was reissued in paperback in 2009. Black Widow’s Wardrobe (Arte Público Press, 1999) and Death at Solstice (Arte Público Press, 2009) are the two most recent editions to The Gloria Damasco Series. In between the publication of these works of fiction, she compiled and edited Máscaras (Third Woman Press, 1997), a collection of essays on writing by prominent Chicana and Latina authors.
Fans can also turn to Corpi’s first mystery novel in a new series, Crimson Moon: A Brown Angel Mystery (Arte Público Press, 2004). Weaving the student movements at Berkeley, a serial rapist within the government’s ranks, a militant Chicano brown power group in Denver, and even the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, Corpi has once again penned an intriguing thriller that revisits one of the most disturbing chapters for the American psyche: the civil rights struggles and student revolts during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In addition to poetry and mystery novels, Lucha Corpi also writes for children. In 1997, she published her first bilingual picture book, Where Fireflies Dance / Ahí, donde bailan las luciérnagas (Children’s Book Press), and The Triple Banana Split Boy / El niño goloso (Arte Público Press) was published in 2009.
Corpi holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkley and an M.A. in World and Comparative Literature from San Francisco State University. A tenured teacher in the Oakland Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Program for 30 years, she retired in 2005.
an artist mom and from an early age visited many art shows and went to artist meetings. A quiet child, I mostly observed. My book was influenced by what I saw. Artists’ circles can be very interesting and strange at times!
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