Pineda is a daughter of a Mexican professor of languages and a French-Swiss artist and teacher. In her autobiographical essay "Deracinated: the writer re-invents her sources" published in Máscaras, she states that her father, along with his father and brothers, fled the Mexican Revolution leaving his mother and sister behind. In 1961, she moved from New York City to San Francisco, California, where she has spent most of her career as a writer and theater maker. In 1969, Pineda founded The Theater of Man which she directed from 1969 to 1981. Performance pieces were developed in an intense rehearsal process in which actors worked with composers, designers, choreographers, playwrights, and sculptors under her direction. Productions included her redaction of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Claude van Itallie's The Serpent, After Eurydice, Stoneground, based on Mujica-Lainz’ Bomarzo, The Trial, after Franz Kafka, and Threesomes. She completed her theater studies in 1970, taking an advanced M.A. degree in theater from San Francisco State University. The Cecile Pineda Papers, 1959–to the present, include a collection of the author's original correspondence, manuscripts, journals, reviews, videos, drafts, rehearsal logs, and posters documenting her career in both literature and theater. The collection is housed at Stanford University, occupying more than. Her academic appointments include positions as writer in residence at San Diego State University and Mills College in Oakland, California, and a Distinguished Regents’ Lectureship at the . An avid reader from childhood, Pineda cites Samuel Beckett, Kōbō Abe, J.M. Coetzee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Franz Kafka as writers whose work has most influenced her.
Awards and recognition
Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
1986, Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California
Face Cecile Pineda's debut novel, Face, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, proposes a protagonist who suffers a catastrophic facial accident. It addresses issues having to do with identity. “When I read Face in 1985, it struck me as an extraordinary achievement, all the more extraordinary for being a first novel. Rereading it has not changed my estimate....Face continues to haunt me.” —J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize, 2003. Frieze Frieze was published soon after in 1987. Set in 9th Century India and Java, it questions the role of the individual artist in a society, which is at once exploitative and oppressive. The Love Queen of the Amazon Published in 1992, with the assistance of a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellowship, Pineda's comic novel, The Love Queen of the Amazon, was named Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times. Its protagonist, Ana Magdelena Figeruoa is awarded in a brokered marriage to a celebrated Latin American man of letters who charges her with providing him with three meals a day and a clean change of underwear while he repairs to his aerie to compose the Great Latin American novel of the Boom Years. The novel is a send-up of hemispheric politics and magic realism. “Ana Magdalena Figueroa is one of the few great Latin heroines not created by the male imagination. Cecile Pineda has enhanced the roster of modern literature's most remarkable female characters with her brilliantly drawn portrait.” —Richard Martins, The Chicago Tribune, March 8, 1992. Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood is Pineda's fictional memoir told in the voice of a five-year-old. Published by Wings Press in 2001, it explores the imaginative formation of the future writer. Bardo99 In 2002, Pineda published the first of her mononovels. Cast as the protagonist's dying hallucination, Bardo 99 is the author's encounter with some of the waning century's most apocalyptic events. Redoubt Pineda followed the publication of Bardo 99 with a second mononovel in 2004. Redoubt follows the stream of consciousness of a sentry standing guard in a desert outpost located somewhere close to or distant from an unnamed capital. It is Pineda's meditation on the state of being born female. “Redoubt is as close as I've ever come to "being one" with a woman, through the pages of a book.” —Rudy Ch. Garcia writing in La Bloga, December 2005.
Non-Fiction Books
Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step . Available in all formats at Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World . Available in all formats at Three Tides Available in all formats at
Plays
Like Snow Melting in Water Like Snow Melting in Water is based on a true story. Set in the contemporary rice-growing village of Ogama on the Sea of Japan, it chronicles the collapse of an agrarian culture and sale of the village to The Tashima Company, a toxic waste disposal company.
