BOOK NEWS: Critical reflections on the work of Luis J. Rodríguez

The Life, Literature and Legacy of Luis J. Rodríguez: In the Long Run

Edited by Josephine Metcalf and Ben Olguin

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399520591

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-life-literature-and-legacy-of-luis-j-rodriguez.html

Luis Rodríguez is a prominent Latinx poet, memoirist and activist renowned for his candid visceral accounts of urban working-class life that includes youth gang violence, incarceration and drug abuse, gruelling factory work and union organising activities and collective approaches to redemption and political empowerment, which have resonated across multiple communities in the United States and abroad. Accordingly, whilst Rodríguez has been the focus of some critical scholarship, huge segments of his life, work and legacy remain unexamined. This anthology has commissioned new and unique critical essays and reflections on Rodríguez’s life and works, putting forward new ideas about bringing the voices of 'barrio organic intellectuals' to the fore. The anthology deliberately includes traditional academics as well as more public intellectuals and creative writers from across Europe and the Americas to reflect Rodriguez’s own diverse outputs as a prisoner author and activist.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

This book is an authoritative anthology on Luis Rodríguez’s life and works that

• Offers a range of perspectives on multiple aspects of his many different accomplishments and activities that can be used in secondary and university curricula
• Gathers peer author reflections that offer insights on Rodriguez’s aesthetics for readers and writers to study and use, thus filling a gap between academic oriented scholarship and popular journalism about Rodriguez and his work
• Introduces new unpublished works by Rodriguez himself and archival materials relating to his career for further use in teaching and research as well as general interest

"The Life, Literature and Legacy of Luis J. Rodríguez: In the Long Run is the most comprehensive overview, critical assessment and sustained study of the renowned former gang member, pinto author, barrio intellectual and critical humanist-philosopher. It encompasses perspectives that account for the significance of his literary impact, his praxis-oriented politics, critical reflections on him by people who’ve known Luis for decades, analysis of the transformation of his once hyper masculinist worldview, pedagogical approaches to Rodriguez’s life story and prison literature, his impact as a publisher, and original new work. In the depth and range of critical perspectives included here, Metcalf and Olguín make a major contribution and set a new standard for US literary history and author studies, community studies and intellectual biographies." – Louis Mendoza, Arizona State University

"Luis J. Rodríguez’s work offers a playbook for how to engage in resistance in these troubled times. This collection of scholarly and literary essays reveals his activism as that of a Chicano 'organic intellectual' in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci who challenges the US’s political, cultural and material hegemony." – Avelardo Valdez, University of Southern California

Josephine Metcalf is a senior lecturer in American studies and criminology at the University of Hull, UK where she is the co-founder and co-director of the Cultures of Incarceration Centre. Her research focuses on the representation of prisons and street gangs in literature and other pop-culture forms and the ways these have been received by audiences. She has published on prison memoirs by authors such as Stanley Tookie Williams and Shaun Attwood and wrote a foreword for an anniversary edition of Joseph Bathanti’s award-winning prison novel, Coventry.

Ben V. Olguín is the Robert and Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding director of the UCSB Global Latinidades Centre. In addition to articles published in Cultural Critique, American Literary History, Aztlán, Frontiers, Biography, MELUS, and Nepantla, Olguín is the author of La Pinta: Chicana/o History, Culture, and Politics (2010) and Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature (2021). He also is a published poet, and author of Red Leather Gloves (2014) and At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous: Poems from Cuba Libre (2014).