La Plonqui: The Literary Life and Work of Margarita Cota-Cárdenas

"La Plonqui is an edited volume centered on the life and literary works of Margarita Cota-Câardenas. The title references Cota-Câardenas's childhood nickname, "La Plonky," which comes from a made-up family ditty. A novelist and poet, Cota-Câardenas earned her PhD at the University of Arizona in 1980, and is professor emerita of Spanish at Arizona State University. She published the bilingual novella, Sanctuaries of the Heart / Santuarios del Corazâon, with UA Press in 2005. The critical essays in La Plonqui cover all five major works written by Cota-Câardenas (two novels and three books of poetry). The manuscript is divided into an Introduction and three major parts. The first part presents the life of Cota-Câardenas in two testimonial essays written by herself and a longtime colleague. The section also includes an interview with Cota-Câardenas prepared by the volume editors. The second part contains nine essays that critically analyze Cota-Câardenas' literary output. The essays are written by well-established literary critics who position her work within a Chicano Movement literary context as well as by contemporary literary critics who offer new readings of Cota-Câardenas fiction and poetry. The third part presents poetry and fiction from Cota-Câardenas, including an excerpt from a work in progress. As a whole, the collection aims to affirm Margarita Cota-Câardenas' significant role in shaping the field of Chicana literature and emphasizes the importance of honoring a celebrated writer, who wrote a majority of her works in Spanish-one of the few Chicana writers to do so"--