For possible new publications, please contact Elise Capron at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
For Luis’s older books and poetry, including permissions, contact Stuart Bernstein.
All works can be purchased at Tia Chucha's Bookstore.
Always Running
The award-winning and bestselling classic memoir about a young Chicano gang member surviving the dangerous streets of East Los Angeles, now featuring a new cover.
Winner of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, hailed as a New York Times notable book, and read by hundreds of thousands, Always Running is the searing true story of one man’s life in a Chicano gang — and his heroic struggle to free himself from its grip.
By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East Los Angeles gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests and then watched with increasing fear as gang life claimed friends and family members. Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and the power of words and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation.
At times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.
"An absolutely unique work: richly literary and poetic, yet urgent and politically explosive at the same time...A permanent testament to human courage and transcendence."
– Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities
"Every spiky anecdote from a life of guns, razors, uppers, downers, glue, heroin, sex, and early death supports this former gang member's view of the violence as collective suicide. That Rodriguez's memoir takes place...before the '92 L.A. riots only makes this beautifully written and politically astute account more compelling."
– Suzanne Ruta, Entertainment Weekly
"Extraordinarily haunting and evocative."
-- Paul Ruffins, The Washington Post Book World
It Calls You Back
The long-awaited follow-up to Always Running, It Calls You Back is the equally harrowing story of Rodriguez starting over, at age eighteen, after leaving gang life—the only life he really knew.
When his oldest son is sent to prison for attempted murder, Rodriguez is forced to confront his shortcomings as a father, and to acknowledge how and why his own history is repeating itself, right before his eyes.
Luis J. Rodriguez describes with heartbreaking honesty his challenges as a father, and his difficulty leaving his rages and addictions completely behind. Even as he breaks with “la vida loca” and begins to discover success as a writer and an activist, Rodriguez finds that his past—the crimes, the drugs, the things he’d seen and done—has a way of calling him back.
"Rodriguez's account of his coming of age is vivid, raw [...] Here's truth no television set, burning night and day, could ever begin to offer."
–The New York Times Book Review
"This is a man who understands that 'giving back' is a natural thing to do--and does it in spades. My respect for his metamorphosis can only be described as awe."
– John Densmore, bestselling author of "Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors"
Todos los Caminos llevan a Casa (All Roads Lead Home)
Luis J. Rodriguez, first ever bilingual (English/ Spanish) poetry book, poemas bilingües
Por primera vez en México se publica una selección bilingüe de la obra poética de Rodríguez en la que se manifiesta el espíritu de un pueblo en resistencia, los valores culturales que han definido su identidad y la fuerza moral del ser chicano en un contexto binacional que lo rechaza y discrintina por su cualidad transfronteriza. La poesía de Rodríguez une y educa a la familia de La Raza, es la manifestación del ideario del Plan Espiritual de Aztlán en el campo del arte y literatura, siendo un estímulo para el pueblo chicano y su cultura revolucionaria.
From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer
From Our Land to Our Land captures this same fantastic energy and wisdom found in all of Rodriguez's work, inspiring not only discussion of acceptance and belonging, but offering an antidote to the harsh binaries found in a culture shaped by xenophobia and intolerance.
As he reminds us in the first essay, “The End of Belonging,” “I’m writing as a Native person. I’m writing as a poet. I’m writing as a revolutionary working class organizer and thinker who has traversed life journeys from which incredible experiences, missteps, plights, and victories have marked the way... I belong anywhere.”
“Powerful from start to finish, Rodriguez's book celebrates Xicanx culture and wisdom while calling for much-needed global healing. A thoughtful and radically provocative collection.”
– Kirkus Reviews
"A poet at heart, Rodriguez rightly claims that 'as long as the world needs changing, we’ll need poetry.' There is still much left to change and the captivating work contained here is a testament to the possibilities of our will to make a difference.”
– Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Children of the Land