A new memoir by Luis Rodríguez, It Calls You Back: A Writer's Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, is due out in October, 2011.

Achieving success as an award-winning Chicano poet who escaped poverty, Rodríguez was sure the streets would haunt him no more — until his young son joined a gang himself. Rodríguez fought for his child by telling his own story in the bestseller Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., a vivid memoir that explores the motivation of gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that inevitably claim its participants. Always Running earned a Carl Sandburg Literary Award and was designated a New York Times Notable Book; it has also been named by the American Library Association as one of the nation’s 100 most censored books.

An accomplished poet, Rodríguez is the author of several collections of poetry, including My Nature is Hunger: New and Selected Poems 1989-2004 (Curbstone Press). His poetry has won a Poetry Center Book Award and a PEN/Josephine Miles Literary Award among others. His books for children, America Is Her Name and It Doesn't Have To Be This Way: A Barrio Story, published in English and Spanish, have also won several awards including a Patterson Young Adult Book Award and a Parent’s Choice Book Award. Rodríguez is also the author of Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times and a novel, Music of the Mill.

Other honors include a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Lannan Fellowship for Poetry, a Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, a California Arts Council fellowship and several Illinois Arts Council fellowships. Rodríguez was also one of 50 leaders worldwide selected as “Unsung Heroes of Compassion,” presented by the Dalai Lama. He is one of the founders of the small poetry publishing house Tia Chucha Press, as well as Tia Chucha's Café & Centro Cultural—a bookstore, coffee shop, art gallery, performance space, and workshop center in Los Angeles.

More info at http://www.luisjrodriguez.com/