Irene I. Blea

Talking with Rudy is Dr. Blea's 14th book. In this unusual, magical realistic, memoir, Dr. Irene I. Blea shares frequent conversations with award-winning author, Rodolfo Anaya, who died in 2022. They were friends for over forty years, shared working on the University of New Mexico campus, and lived near one another. Anaya is best known for his book, Bless Me Ultima. In this volume, Dr. Blea recalls platicas, conversations, with her friend, Rudy, about the essence of his writing, growing up in New Mexico, the nature of university life, the art and business of writing, publishing, death, dying, and spirituality. Blea, also an award-winning author and a sociologist, draws from their shared community understanding, and her ability to write in a multidisciplinary manner to poetically close the gap between literature and social science to render us an opportunity to say good-bye to Rodolfo Anaya, the godfather of Chicano literature.

Irene Blea began writing poetry at a young age. She first read her poetry at civil right rallies and later at professional conferences and published her work as chapbooks, short books of poetry. Dragonfly is her complete poetic work up to the year 2023. These are poems of spiritual guidance and transformation. Here is what she wrote on New Year's day. I do not want to die at home on a sweltering summer afternoon when everyone is working and not be found for a week bloated and smelling on the bathroom or kitchen floor. If I must leave this world, it should be after viewing the golden firefly that visited me in my yard each year one more time. I am not okay living to a hundred, but do not want to die before I inform you that throughout my life, I wrote much poetry and that I was one of few women at the forefront of Chicano literature. This type of poetry was an important literary movement. Chicano and Chicana poetry was rooted in resistance to class discrimination, racism, and sexism. Early poets of the time created a genre that added to American literature another category. We had unique philosophical, topical, and aesthetic features different from the divisions of genres of the time. This literary movement provided language for comparing, contrasting, and discussing literary words and works, and served as an introduction to the formation of curricula and anthologies. In this collection of fifty years of her poetry, Dr. Irene I. Blea brazenly relates her efforts to understand what she thought was wrong with her. She came to an understanding of social and historical factors that misinformed her colonized mind. Decolonization demanded evaluating her mind, body, and spirit and how she fed into it. She portrays decolonization as a complex process involving the rejection or redefinition of the colonizer's language, embracing her own tri-cultural history, and commitment to ongoing learning and growth. This is a lifelong process that requires dedication and struggle to create a more just and equitable world and the author shares her transformation from the prescription of traditional female roles riddled by confusion and conflict to one of peace, under standing, and redefinition. This was a physical, psychological, and spiritual process that brought her to the understanding of what it means to be a female human in a sometimes hostile world.

Erené with Wolf Medicine is Dr. Irene Blea's 12th book and there are many surprises. the autobiography introduces readers to the complexities of growing up and getting old in three cultures: Native American, Chicano, and mainstream Anglo dominated America. Added to her long list of publications are her fictionalized family stories that include: Suzanna, Poor People's Flowers and Beneath the Super Moon. Blea places her characters with a social-historical context drawing for her native New Mexican roots, her life in Colorado, California, and the need to return to her birthplace. She has Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado-Boulder and two of her textbooks: Toward A Chicano Social Science and La Chicana are considered "Classics" in her field. After her retirement from California State University-Los Angeles Blea wrote Daughters of the West Mesa based on a true unsolved serial killing and the remains of 11 women and an unborn fetus found in the Albuquerque desert. Ten of the women were Chicanas or Native American and one was African American. Her work in progress is a collection of poetry that is still untitled. The author uses her knowledge as a Tenured, Full Professor, and Chairperson of the Mexican American Studies Department at CSU-LA and her life in the southwestern part of the United States to create her publications. She frequently speaks at conferences and on college campus about populations often missing from the literature. She lectured as a New Mexico Humanities Council Scholar for 10 years and is expert on race, class & gender relation. Blea has traveled internationally throughout the Americas and enjoys Mexico and Costa Rica. In Israel, China, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Sicily, and Germany she has delivered academic lectures, read her poetry, and discussed research for her books. Over the course of her extensive career she has also written and published four poetry chapbooks, over 35 academic and popular articles, and has developed a strong on-line presence with an emphasis on women. Dr. Blea has received many awards for her scholarship, her human rights work, and poetry. In in the early 1980s she won the Dr. Martin Luther King Literary Award, read with Alex Ginsberg and Andy Clausen and was honored for her community service by two separate community organizations. In May, 2009 she was recognized by LULAC of New Mexico for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement. In 2015 she was featured as the Best of Albuquerque by ABQ the Magazine, and was referred to as the "... Latinx writer of our time" the Women's March. Visit Dr. Irene Blea on Facebook.