Visit Pat Mora's personal Website and you'll be treated to a colorful and informative guide to the writer and her works, including a comprehensive biography and descriptions and reviews of most of her books This site is personal, informative, and fun to navigate.

Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/patmora.html

This page includes an online version of one of Mora's poems ("Chant"), a good biography, and some literary criticism of her work. Also included is a select bibliography, a list of works about the author, brief reviews of a few of her books, and some related links about the author.

Author's Online Library: Pat Mora
http://teacher.scholastic.com/authorsandbooks/authors/mora/bio.htm

Click here to gain access to another good resource for Mora. Here you'll find a transcript of an informative and revealing Q&A session with Mora, along with a good biography, and brief summaries about nine of her books.

Southwestern Literature: Pat Mora
http://web.nmsu.edu/~tomlynch/swlit.mora.html

A project of Tom Lynch's Southwestern Literature class at New Mexico State University, this page provides you with a good biography, a catalog of Mora's children's books, poems and poetry collections, and autobiography and essay collections. You'll also be able to view a list of the author's awards, some comments about her work, and "Works Cited and Useful Web Links."

BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Mora (b. 1942) was born in El Paso, Texas, where her grandparents had moved from Mexico to escape revolution in the early 20th century. She received a B.A. from Texas Western College and an M.A. from the University of Texas, El Paso. Mora began teaching after graduation and hosting a public radio show, Voices: The Mexican-American in Perspective. Her first volume of poetry, Chants (1984), is a celebration of her Mexican-American heritage as well as the desert setting where she grew up. The book won the first of her several Southwest Book awards, the second coming for her next collection Borders in 1986. In that same year she was awarded a Kellogg National Fellowship to study the preservation of minority cultures. Mora has also became an activist for children's literacy, and has published many children's books including A Birthday Basket for Tia (1992), winner of her third Southwest book award, and Tomas and the Library Lady (1997), winner of the Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award. In addition to her poetry and children's literature, Mora has published two books of nonfiction, Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle (1993) and the memoir House of Houses (1997).