Remembering Michele Serros, 1966-2015

The Chicana poet, spoken-word artist, and all around fantastic writer, Michele Serros, passed away this weekend at the age of 48. Her cause of death was cancer. From Jacket Copy's David L Ulin:

I used to know Michele Serros — who died of cancer Sunday at her home in Berkeley at the age of 48 — a little bit. In the mid-1990s she and I, along with a bunch of other people, helped launch PEN in the Classroom, a program to put writers together with under-served students in Los Angeles-area high schools.

For Serros this was an unlikely homecoming. Growing up in Oxnard, she found herself on the outside looking in. “We never said we lived in Oxnard,” she once explained of her family. “We always said we lived between Malibu and Santa Barbara.”

What makes such a line so telling is that it sets up the tensions and the oppositions, as well as the sharp sense of humor, that occupied the center of Serros’ work. There’s a reason, after all, that her first book — published in 1994, while she was a UCLA undergraduate — was called “Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard,” a titled inspired by a high school classmate called La Letty, who “had a strong definition of what a Chicana was.”

In a 1997 Los Angeles Times profile, Serros explained the conflict: “Here I was in school thinking maybe I’d go to college and become a writer. My Spanish was horrible, I wore Vans to school and La Letty was like ‘What a Chicana falsa you are.’ ”

More to the point, Serros was writing about a different kind of Chicana experience. She was a pure product of Southern California, not unlike poets such as David Trinidad or Michele T. Clinton, influenced by pop culture as much as by a more traditional sense of heritage. “I grew up fourth-generation Californian,” she once explained. “To me, all my experiences — the beach, the malls, avocados — very Californian. I happen to be Chicana.”

Learn more about Michele Serros at Jacket Copy.