About Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros is an American-Mexican poet and novelist, born in Chicago on December 20, 1954. She is best known for her novels The House on Mango Street and Caramel, the latter published in 1999 by Knopf. Her Mexican origins strongly influence her work. She was born to a Chicana mother and a Mexican father, the only daughter among the couple's seven children. After studying at Loyola University, Chicago, where she earned a B.A. in 1976, she was admitted to the prestigious Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she graduated with an M.F.A. in 1978. During her career, which began in 1980 with the lyrics of Bad Boys, she has published two novels, essays, collections of short stories and poetry, and children's books, receiving numerous awards such as the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Awards, the MacArthur Fellows Program, and the PEN/Nabokov Award.She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1982. The grant allowed her to spend a year at the Mihály Károlyi Institute in Vence, France. She works as the director of literature at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas, and in Puerto Rico.
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We need to write because so many of our stories are not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight back against what's hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory.
