Pat Mora's Teen Books Biography

"No one has felt like this. Ever." So thinks a teen in Dizzy in Your Eyes: Poems About Love, Pat's second collection for young adults. Pat also wrote My Own True Name: New and Selected Poems for Young Adults and six poetry collections for adults including Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints, Agua Santa: Holy Water, Communion, Borders, and Chants. Tucson Weekly wrote that her last collection, Adobe Odes, "turns its back on hopelessness and finds a way to delight in our everyday world of food, literature, nature, religion and yes, people." The New York Times wrote that "Ms. Mora's poems are proudly bilingual, an eloquent answer to purists who refuse to see language as something that lives and changes."

She's also the author of three books of nonfiction. Zing! Seven Creativity Practices for Educators and Students will be published in April. Choice reviewed Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle as, "Twenty inspiring essays written in a very poetic prose...A valuable contribution to American literature." The Washington Post described Pat's acclaimed memoir, House of Houses as a "textual feast...a regenerative act...and an eloquent bearer of the old truth that it is through the senses that we apprehend love."

Pat received Honorary Doctorates in Letters from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo and is an Honorary Member of the American Library Association. Among her other awards are a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship to write in Umbria, Italy, a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship.

The author of many award-winning children's books, Pat is the founder of the family literacy initiative El día de los niños / El día de los libros, Children's Day / Book Day (Día), now housed at the American Library Association. The year-long commitment to linking all children to books, languages and cultures, and of sharing what Pat calls "bookjoy," culminates in celebrations across the country in April.

A popular national speaker shaped by the U.S.-Mexico border where she was born and spent much of her life, Pat is the mother of three grown children. She gratefully lives in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico.