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Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas

Dancing with Ghosts brings to life the complex and overlapping worlds inhabited by the gay Chicano poet, novelist, scholar, and professor, Arturo Islas.

Frederick Luis Aldama

Dancing with Ghosts brings to life the complex and overlapping worlds inhabited by the gay Chicano poet, novelist, scholar, and professor, Arturo Islas. Interweaving of life history, criticism, and literary theory, Aldama paints an unusually rich and wide-ranging portrait of both the man and the eventful times in which he lived. Drawing from hundreds of unpublished letters, lecture notes, drafts of essays, novels, and poetry archived at Stanford University, Aldama also deals frankly with the controversies that swirled around Islas's impassioned love life, his drug addictions, and his scholarly and professional career as one of the first Chicano/a professors in the United States. He discusses the importance of Islas's pioneering role in bridging Anglo, Latin American, Chicano/a, and European storytelling styles and voices.

Dancing with Ghosts brings to life the complex and overlapping worlds inhabited by the gay Chicano poet, novelist, scholar, and professor, Arturo Islas. Interweaving of life history, criticism, and literary theory, Aldama paints an unusually rich and wide-ranging portrait of both the man and the eventful times in which he lived. Drawing from hundreds of unpublished letters, lecture notes, drafts of essays, novels, and poetry archived at Stanford University, Aldama also deals frankly with the controversies that swirled around Islas's impassioned love life, his drug addictions, and his scholarly and professional career as one of the first Chicano/a professors in the United States. He discusses the importance of Islas's pioneering role in bridging Anglo, Latin American, Chicano/a, and European storytelling styles and voices.

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