sentences, and punctuation for effect." Awards, honors and recognition Rechy is the first novelist to receive PEN-USA-West's Lifetime Achievement Award (1997); he is the recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle (1999) and an NEA fellow. He is a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He is the first recipient of ONE Magazine Culture Hero Award. In 2016, he won the first annual Los Angeles Review of Books/UCR Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award. At the 30th Lambda Literary Awards in 2018, he won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction for After the Blue Hour. In 2018, Rechy was also awarded with the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement noting that he is "a major figure in Mexican, LGBTQ and Los Angeles literary communities." In 2020 The Texas Institute of Letters honored Rechy with its Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award. TIL President Carmen Tafolla called Rechy's work "a significant turning point in modern American literature, and a prose so poetically crafted it sharpens our perception of both the beauty and the ache of the human experience." Legacy Writers Michael Cunningham, Kate Braverman, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Gina Nahai were students of Rechy's creative writing classes before becoming published authors. Rechy's contributions to women-centered narratives and the Chicana feminist canon are reflected in many of his works. Maria DeGuzman argues in her book, Understanding John Rechy, that "his decolonial Chicana feminist representations of women indicate the fact that he has long understood the relationship that exists between misogyny and homophobia (against gay men as well as against LGBTQ+ more generally). The oppression of women and trans women (for example, “Troja” in Marilyn’s Daughter) is not just about Latinx communities; it is, in Rechy’s work, also about the larger U.S. culture." English pop artist David Hockney's painting Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles was inspired by a passage in City of Night. The 1983 song "Numbers" by the English synth-pop duo Soft Cell was inspired by Rechy's 1967 novel of the same title. A CD-ROM of Rechy's life and work was produced by the Annenberg Center of Communications and is titled Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy. In 2019 the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University acquired Rechy's complete archive stating, "This treasure trove of letters serves as a virtual diary of one of the most