Biography

Claudia Rodriguez is a community scholar, educator, creative writer and performer from Compton.  She published her first collection of poetry “Everybody’s Bread” in 2015 with Korima Press.  For the past twenty years, she has developed work for/about and with marginalized communities. As a 2016 COLA Fellow, an award from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Claudia  wrote a performance poem entitled “Midnight Steel” that challenges mainstream perceptions of Compton.  As part of the process, she conducted interviews with residents of Compton and wove their voices into her performance.  As a 2014 recipient of an Artists in Residence Grant ($8,0000) from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, she developed the project “Nuestros Cuerpos Nuestras Almas/Our Bodies, Our Souls (OBOS).”  OBOS was a literary project wherein she worked with Transgender Latina immigrants. Through facilitated creative writing exercises, they explored their biographies and produced creative works to be published in a bilingual OBOS anthology (forthcoming 2017). This project addresses the glaring absence of literary work written by transgender Latina immigrants. She is a founding member of Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP) a sketch-driven performance/ installation/video ensemble (now defunked). She performed with BdP from 2002 to 2010 all across the country.

As a doctoral student, her goal is to pursue arts-based action research questions that investigate how race relations between Blacks and Chicana/os in the City of Compton have shifted along with its demographics. This will include collaborating with the young community organizers in the city to evaluate the shared oppressions between Chicana/os and Blacks that contribute to interracial conflict and how to move beyond it.