Mary Pat Brady, assistant professor of English at Cornell University, is the winner of the Modern Language Association of America's first annual prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Brady, who directs of the Latino Studies Program at Cornell, was honored for her book, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space , published by Duke University Press (2002).

Brady received the MLA prize during the association's annual convention held in December 2003 in San Diego.

"The field of Latino-Latina literary criticism is developing in extraordinary ways," Brady said. "I'm delighted and very honored that my book has been singled out by leading colleagues in the field."

The MLA committee's citation for Brady's book, in part, reads: "At the theoretical, critical, historical and social level, the book covers a great deal of material and distinguishes itself by its theoretical acuity, its methodological rigor and its textual sensitivity."

Brady, a Chicana from Arizona, joined the Cornell faculty in 1999 from Indiana University, where she was an assistant professor of English. Her scholarly and professional interests include: U.S. Latino and Latina literature and culture; cultural studies and American multiethnic literature.

She received a B.A. in English from Arizona State University (1984) and an M.A. (1993) and a Ph.D. (1996), both in English, from the University of California-Los Angeles.

Brady has two articles in the forthcoming issue of Chicana/o Cultural Studies and has had essays printed in such journals as Nepantla: Views from the South, Western American Literature and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She currently serves as associate editor of the Heath Anthology. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. In 1999, Brady was awarded the Norman Foerster Prize for best article in the journal American Literature.

The MLA's 30,000 members promote the advancement of literary and linguistic studies.