Created by Lucha Corpi
(1945–)
GLORIA DEMASCO is a petite Chicana, born in Oakland, California. She came from a working class family, and was trained as a speech therapist. She’s a young widow (she was married to a Puerto Rican, Nuerriqueño) with a daughter. She’s very involved in local politics, both as an activist and a tireless supporter of Chicano poets and artists in the Bay Area. Oh, and she’s clairvoyant.
A college student at the conclusion of her first recorded case, Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), by the conclusion of 1999’s Black Widow, she’s become P.I. She works with her partner, both professional and romantic, Justin Escobar. They both love to cook with a Mexican flavor and he loves jazz.
Lucha Corpi is a Chicana poet and mystery writer. She was born in Mexico, and moved to the U.S. in the sixties to attend school, earning a B.A. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in comparative literature from San Francisco State University. Living in California’s Bay Area, she became involved in the fight for bilingual education, women’s and civil rights. Corpi’s most important contribution to Chicano literature, a series of four poems called “The Marina Poems,” appeared in the anthology The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women’s Poetry in Translation. Eulogy for a Brown Angel, her first mystery novel, won the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Best Book of Fiction award in 1992.
UNDER OATH
- “A haze of dazzlingly evocative prose… Corpi’s ear for Latino rhythms and her feminist leanings produce some original and highly charged narrative moments… Although careful readers might anticipate the solution and wish for a few more suspects, Corpi expands the genre with this work of small triumphs.”
— Publishers Weekly - “Corpi brings a Chicana feminist perspective to the mystery genre and does so with enough originality to overcome some stilted and murky writing…. Awkward and slow moving at times, but still worthwhile mystery-reading.”
— Kirkus Reviews
NOVELS
- Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Cactus Blood (1995) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Black Widow’ (1999) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Susan Sotelo, from the University of Arizona, who’s doing research on the Chicano detective novel.
