Chávez, Denise

Born in Las Cruces, N.M. in 1948. Received advanced educational degrees in drama and creative writing. Worked in the Artist-in-Residence Program in various New Mexico communities. Teaches and gives workshops in writing, creative dramatics, and acting. Her plays have been produced throughout the United States and abroad.

Photo of Denise Chavez taken by Cynthia Farah Haines. Part of Writers of the Southwest Collection. PICT 988-030.

Denise Chávez was born August 15, 1948 in Las Cruces, New Mexico to Epifanio E. Chávez, a lawyer, and Delfina Rede Chávez, a teacher. She was drawn at an early age to the artistic qualities of bilingualism. The Mexican-American border area, her home, and community environment afforded Chávez the opportunity to appreciate the musicality of the spoken word in conversations, prayers, tales, and legends--a poetic speech that she soon identified as a potential means of literary re-creation. At Madonna High School in Mesilla, New Mexico, she took a theatre class and discovered that theatre was the creative means by which she could integrate the different aspects of her artistic inclinations. Chávez received a drama scholarship to New Mexico State University where she studied with Mark Medoff, author of the play Children of a Lesser God, and in 1971 she received a bachelor's degree in drama. She received a master of fine arts degree in drama in 1974 from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and had the experience of working in the Dallas Theatre Center. She continued her studies in drama and writing, and in 1984 received a master of arts degree in creative writing from the University of New Mexico.

Chávez has worked in the Artist-in-Residence Program in the New Mexico communities of Aztec, Socorro, Alamogordo (the New Mexico School for the Visually Handicapped), as well as in Carlsbad and Las Cruces. She taught at the Radium Springs Center for Women, where she helped to edit the women's newspaper and a poetry anthology, Life is a Two-Way Street . She taught play-writing at the College of Santa Fe and English composition and literature at Northern New Mexico Community College. She gives frequent workshops in writing, creative dramatics, and acting, as well as many readings from her work. She has worked as a writer-in-residence throughout New Mexico, most specifically with La Compañia de Teatro de Albuquerque, a bilingual theatre company, and Theatre-in-the-Red from Santa Fe. Seventeen of her plays have been produced throughout the United States including the Joseph Papp Festival of Latino Theatre in New York, and at the Edinburgh, Scotland Festival of the Arts. Chávez has taught at the American School in Paris. In 1988 she participated in a creative writing symposium in Moscow in which artists from the United States and the then Soviet Union exchanged ideas on contemporary art. Chávez has recently won the Premio Aztlán for her work Face of an Angel and presently teaches at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico.