Francisco Jimenez, an award-winning children’s writer and Santa Clara University professor, will receive the John Steinbeck “In the souls of the people” award at a September 28 event benefiting San Jose State University’s Cesar Chavez Community Action Center. The award, which has been given in the past to such writers as Ruby Bridges and Khaled Hosseini, is sponsored by the school’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. As a boy Jimenez migrated to California from Mexico with his family, whose transient existence he compares to that of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. His first book, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child (1997), won the Americas Award for Children and Young Adults Literature. After receiving his PhD, he joined the faculty of Santa Clara University, his alma mater, where he was CASE/Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year in 2002. He is an especially sympathetic admirer of Cesar Chavez, the labor and civil rights leader who—with Dolores Huerta, a previous Steinbeck award winner—founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962. The September 28 benefit, which begins at 7:30 p.m. in San Jose State University’s Student Union Theater, will feature Francisco Jimenez in conversation with Lalo Alcarez, the creator of “La Cucaracha,” the first nationally syndicated political cartoon by a Latino artist in the United States. General admission tickets are $20 and are available from the San Jose State University event center.
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