Elena Díaz Bjorkquist

Elena Diaz Bjorkquist is a Mexican American writer, historian, and artist from Tucson. Elena’s two books of short stories, Suffer Smoke and Water from the Moon, are about the people in Morenci, Arizona where she was born.

Elena Díaz Björkquist is a former public administrator who developed and managed CETA, a federally funded public employment program for the County of Sonoma in California from 1974 to 1978.

In 1978 Elena switched careers to teaching. She taught K – 12 students English-as-a-Second Language and served as Bilingual Coordinator for the Anderson Valley Elementary School.  At Mendocino High School she taught Spanish and U.S. History.  Her last teaching position was at Sonoma State University where she taught Chicano Studies from 1996 to 1998.

Elena returned to her home state of Arizona in 1999 and is currently a writer, historian, and artist from Tucson.

>>  What has she learned from her different career twists and turns?  How did each position transition into the others?

Elena’s two books of short stories, Suffer Smoke and Water from the Moon, are about the people in Morenci, Arizona where she was born. Elena co-edited Sowing the Seeds; una cosecha de recuerdos, an anthology written by a collective of Latina writers in 2002. The project was funded by the Arizona Humanities Council (AHC).

Elena has also written a full-length play about Chautauqua Teresa Urrea, a curandera who lived in the 1900’s, which has had two readings in Tucson.

Currently she is nearing completion of another collection of Morenci stories entitled Albóndiga Soup and is co-editing a second anthology by the Sowing the Seeds Collective entitled Our Spirit, Our Reality.

>>  What can Elena tell us about being an author?  What has she learned from the different kinds of books she’s worked on?

Elena has been on the AHC Speakers Bureau for six years. She undertakes different kinds of speaking engagements at community centers, museums and libraries; for example, she performs the role of a Teresa Urrea, and also does two presentations about Morenci and one on Chicano Art.

In 2001 Elena became a SIROW (Southwest Institute of Research on Women) Research Associate at the University of Arizona and completed a project funded by AHC, “In the Shadow of the Smokestack,” an oral history project she did interviewing 10 elders from her hometown.

>>  What can we learn from Elena about getting arts projects publicly funded?

Elena has developed a website containing oral history interviews and photographs of Chicano elders living in Morenci during the Depression and World War II.

In 2005 she finished another project funded by AHC and the Stocker Foundation, “The Tubac 1880’s Schoolhouse Living History Program,” a teacher’s manual, lesson plan and short stories that wrote the Mexican experience back into the history of Tubac.

>>  What can we learn from Elena about how she organizes and records her projects?

Art has always been a passion for Elena, and in 1990 she found her medium in clay. She perfected her craft and teaches clay classes in her studio Casita TzinTzunTzan. She also teaches bookmaking and drum making classes.

>>  How does Elena combine her different passions?

Check out her website at www.elenadiazbjorkquist.net