to Chicano undergraduates and fellows, and co-director of the Stanford Center for Chicano Research. He taught classes focusing on the English language and minority groups, and a class entitled "Chicano Themes", the first such class to be taught in Stanford's English Department. He received the Dinkelspiel Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence in 1976. In the same year, he was promoted to associate professor, thereby becoming Stanford's first tenured Chicano professor. In 1977, Islas took a sabbatical to finish writing Dia de los Muertos, the novel that would be published as The Rain God in 1984. The novel was awarded the best fiction prize from the Border Regional Library Conference in 1985 and was selected by the Bay Area Reviewers Association as one of the three best novels of 1984. In 1986, Islas became a full professor at Stanford University and began to write Migrant Souls, a sequel to The Rain God that was published in 1991. He had planned the books to be part of a trilogy and was working on the final book, La Mollie and the King of Tears, when he died. The novel was published posthumously. Personal life Islas lived with Jay Spears until they broke up in 1970. Islas learned in 1985 that Spears was in hospital with AIDS, from which he died in 1986. Islas himself died of complications related to AIDS on 15 February 1991 at his campus home. Writing style Islas wrote and published in several genres, but is best known for his two finished novels, The Rain God and Migrant Souls. Both of these books depict the Angel family, who live in the border region of the United States. Islas believed deeply in writing about the Chicano experience in America to "help make visible Chicano/a creative expression and [the] struggle against institutional and individual racist acts", and encouraged his Chicano/a students to write from their own heritage and experience. Islas consistently used autobiographical details in his novels, particularly in the form of the character Miguel, who attends college in California and struggles with serious health issues, as Islas did for most of his life. Islas also wrote local stories about El Paso into his work, and his disciplinarian grandmother, Crecenciana, appears in the form of Mama Chona. One scholar wrote that "[The Rain God] is a fictional autobiography because it is, first and foremost, the protagonist's own account of how the Angel