Works by
Sheila Ortiz Taylor
(Writer)
[1939 - ]

Faultline (1982)
Possibly the first lesbian novel with a Chicana heroic character.

Slow Dancing at Miss Polly's (1989)
Poetry

Imaginary Parents (1996)
In this uniquely fashioned memoir, one sister uses words, the other installations to re-create a childhood filled with adventure, tragedy, and the two most glamorous and mysterious people in their young lives: their parents. The setting is Los Angeles during and after World War Two. Hollywood is defining. Cigarettes ubiquitous. A meal is not a meal without meat or eggs. Red lips, toenails, and fingernails match red cotton blouses festooned with yellow sombreros.

Taking on the voices of her mother, father and sister--as well as speaking for herself--Sheila Ortiz Taylor, the writerly daughter of an Anglo vaudevillian-lawyer and a Chicana movie star manqué, strings together well-crafted vignettes that read like film clips. One scene leads to another, fractures into another until a rich family drama and a remarkably clear child perspective emerge through the silences and substance.

Sandra, the elder, artistic sister, offers 3-D collages in a simultaneous yet slightly shifted narrative of life under their father's red-tiled roof.

Mirrors, tortillas, calaveras, Mexico, horses, books, boats and guns are the curios of the Ortiz Taylor family cabinet. Readers will set to recollecting their own pocadillas after relishing this funny, touching portrait of a regular yet anything but common American family.

Coachella (1998)
It's 1983 in Coachella Valley and Yolanda Ramírez, a lowly phlebotomist at the Palm Springs hospital, has a hunch. Gay men, hemophiliacs, and women scarred by cosmetic surgery are dying. Safe blood, like the water keeping this desert green, is a lie.
In the nearby trailer, Isabel Ochoa Dreyfus disappears into a new identity: Marina Lomas. Somewhere in Iowa her businessman husband sits in the dark, staring at his drink, promising never to hit her again, if only he can track her down.

Despite herself, Marina finds companionship at Mac and Gil's annual Casa Diva fashion show. As glamorous men stride up and down a poolside runway, Yo awakens Marina's sleeping desire.

Elsewhere in Coachella, Yo's father Crescencio, a gardener, soothes Eliana Townsend, his secret love, by coaxing life from the earth outside her window. She is dying, most likely from AIDS, but no one will tell her the truth. And through it all Crescencio's sister, Tía Josie, keeps the family steady with wisdom from the Rockford Files and her dead Cahuilla husband.

Truths surge to the surface in this community of false fronts and deep roots as readers are whisked toward the deafening conclusion of Coachella, the latest from one of Chicano literature's finest writers.

This desert mystery novel, set in Palm Springs in 1983, is from one of Chicana literature's finest writers.

OutRageous (2006) -- Finalist 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
Arden Benbow is a motorcycle riding, lesbian Latina poet from LA who has at last received her degree from UCLA. Now she's been hired to teach poetry in a small liberal arts college in northwest Florida and the administrators have no idea what they're about to come up against. This is the seventies, and social change is creeping slowly but inevitably across the country from California.

Since firing Arden is out of the question, the administration soon sets into motion a plan they feel is certain to make Arden want to leave. As their machinations become increasingly complex, Arden happily and even obliviously sets up housekeeping in her newly purchased decaying southern mansion just across the rugby field from the college. While the administration struggles to keep southern academe the same, Arden gradually enlists women faculty, immigrant farm laborers, rural residents, a lesbian feminist press, and the whole student body to create a new green world of women's values.

Assisted Living (2007 release)
Violet March, an eighty-two year old resident of Casa de los Sueños, finally has the opportunity to put years of mystery reading to practical use. One by one her comrades, the Bingos, are dying. Is this natural attrition, or is there a plot afoot?
At night, walking unsteadily behind her trusty purple walker, she explores the corridors, while behind doors left ajar the uneasy residents of assisted living do Kegal exercises, compose operas, climb mountains, re-live trips to Cozumel, and ask intriguing questions about the nature of aging and of death.

Like most detectives, Violet March does not work alone. Her immediate circle of assistants include the cosmetologist, Melanie Rae Cherrier, the mortician, Lucas Barnwell, and the accountant, Diana Reyes. But others are inevitably drawn into the solution of the crime and the celebration of the mystery.