I Need Help To Finish My Book

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

 

After our escape from New Orleans and arrival in New England, with the generous help of my son's clients, we have arrived in a state of disarray, and myself with needing to rebuild my office, remove my books from storage, and replace my computer to finish my final book of essays. My son took loans to help us move to safety so I could finish my book, but we are not quite there yet.

 

My research is in storage and we cannot afford to get it out, along with my clothing. We also have no proper furniture with which I can write on or sit other than my bed, which due to my illness was essential for us to bring, thank goodness, but not a table, desk, or chair.

 

We didn't want to request help, but Joe convince me that it might be the only way to finish my book. We're in the final stretch of completing it, but the duress of our current situation requires assistance. I need to get to doctors, afford the diet I was on to maintain my health, a workspace, and if possible a new laptop. Mine is practically broken which Joe works hard to keep alive. Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated, we're on a mission to complete this book, and I to stabilize my life after an epic journey.

 

Thank you all for your support! We must keep our voices heard!

 

Norma Alarcon

 

 

 

Norma Alarcón was born in Villa Frontera, Coahuila, Mexico on November 30, 1943. Her family immigrated to San Antonio, Texas in 1955 in order to find work, and settled in Chicago, Illinois by the end of that same year. There, her father worked as a steelworker and her mother worked as a candy packer for Marshall Fields.

Alarcón graduated from the Catholic school St. Thomas the Apostle in 1961 as a member of the National Honor Society and started college at De Paul University, but left in 1962 to marry her first husband. She had her only son, Joe McKesson, in 1964. Later, Alarcón returned to school at Indiana University Bloomington to graduate Phi Beta Kappa in 1973 with a degree in Spanish literature and a minor in comparative literature. She then entered the Ph.D. program in Spanish literature at Indiana University. Despite the combined pressures of going through her first divorce, raising a son, making a living, and working on her Ph.D. program, Alarcón founded Third Woman Press in 1979 and completed her dissertation, "Ninfomanía: El Discurso feminista en la obra de Rosario Castellanos," a theoretical study of Mexican feminist literary criticism, in 1983.[3]

Alarcón taught in the Foreign Language department at Purdue University in Indiana from 1983 until she received the Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 and got hired by the Ethnic Studies department there in 1987. She received tenure there in 1993.

Alarcón was a Professor of Comparative Ethnic/Indigenous Studies, Women's Studies, and Spanish, as well as the founder and publisher of Third Woman Press, which she began as a journal in 1979 when she realized that "there weren't enough other women of color or Latinas for me to have a conversation with."[4] After printing about six issues of the journal that each focused on a different geographical region of the United States, she transformed the project into an independent press in 1987. The press published more than thirty books and anthologies until 2004, when Alarcón had a health crisis that left no time to continue her unpaid volunteer work with the press and led her to retire from the University.[5] Alarcón is cited for her substantial contributions to "postmodern Chicana feminism.