Novelist John Rechy to Receive UCSB’s Luis Leal Literature Award

Novelist John Rechy is this year’s recipient of the UC Santa Barbara’s Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The award will be presented during a ceremony at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 6, in the University Center’s Corwin Pavilion at UCSB. The event is free and open to the public.

Rechy is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including “City of Night,” which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013; “Numbers”; and “The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez.” In addition, his essays have appeared in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Village Voice, The New York Times and Saturday Review. He is the first novelist to receive PEN-USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award and is the first recipient of ONE Magazine’s Culture Hero Award.

Rechy has been nominated twice for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards Body of Work designation, and he has been named a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition, he has received fiction awards from Phi Kappa Phi and the Longview Foundation.

To view the complete story, open the attached news release, or go to http://www.news.ucsb.edu/node/013926/ucsb-honor-city-night-author