Helena María Viramontes

Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and two novels: Under the Feet of Jesus, which bears witness to the struggles of a makeshift family of migrant farmworkers in California, and Their Dogs Came with Them (2008), a masterful depiction of the lives of the dispossessed, the working poor, the homeless, and the undocumented of East Los Angeles, where Viramontes was born and raised. 

Named a Ford Fellow in Literature by United States Artists, Viramontes has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus and a 2017 Bellagio Center Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2015, California State University-Long Beach inaugurated the Helena María Viramontes Lecture.  Viramontes is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she is at work on a novel.