Phillip Serrato, PhD

As a teacher and scholar, Phillip Serrato tends to fret over issues of race, gender, and sexuality in children's and adolescent literature. Aided and abetted by his students, he fusses over constructions of masculinity in children's books, explores the ways that books for young adults engage the subjects of love, sex, and desire, and generally goes out of his way to test students' presumptions about the limits of literature for young people. Trained in Chicano/a literary, cultural, and film studies at UC Riverside, he brings to the SDSU children's literature program a specialization in Chicano/a children's and adolescent literature. Over the past few years, he has published essays on Latino professional wrestlers and on the Personal Memoirs of Juan Seguín, and he has co-authored an article on Gloria Anzaldúa's two illustrated books for children. His current work focuses on the construction, deconstruction, and re-imagination of Chicano masculinity in books for children and young adults by Chicano and Chicana authors. Warning: If given a chance, he will talk ad nauseam about Rage Against the Machine, Shakira, American Chopper, Night of the Living Dead, Where the Wild Things Are, U2, El Vez, and Pablo and Miguel (his two beautiful sons).