Along for the Ride
Michele's cuckoo from years of Coco-Puffs!
About the showHow to listenContact the showArchives

What's your favorite childhood cereal?

michele serros

Video

NEW THIS WEEK, get the first peek at Michele's foray into film. Here's "Medium Brown Girl" an excerpt from her documentary, The Brown Ambition Tour.

Audio

LISTEN to Michele's Haiku for Coco Puffs.

Text

READ a chapter from Michele's recent book, How to be a Chicana Role Model.

When young Michele told people in her hometown of Oxnard, California, that she wanted to be a writer, many tried to dissuade her. For years she was convinced that writers didn't come from places like Oxnard and didn't have names like Serros.

But she was determined to show them. She invented a pen name and alter ego: Michael Hill (Serros means "hills" in Spanish). As Michael Hill she wrote about true love and other mysterious things that poets were supposed to write about. When she was introduced to chicano literature in college she began to write about her life in stories, not just in her journal.

Michele is the author of two books - Chicana Falsa and How to Be a Chicana Role Model. She has also put out a CD of her poems. She writes regular commentaries for magazines and radio and is producing a documentary, Medium Brown Girl, about her (sometimes wretched) experiences meeting her "fans" on book tour.