Poet & writer, Sandra Cisneros at Cortez Public Library tomorrow evening, May 12th, 7 p.m.

http://www.sandracisneros.com/index.php

Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street(1984) and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell.

Cisneros’s early life provided many experiences she would later draw on as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant migration of her family between Mexico and the USA instilled in her the sense of “always straddling two countries … but not belonging to either culture.”^[3] Cisneros’s work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities, to the extent that The House on Mango Street has been translated worldwide and is taught in American classrooms as a coming-of-age novel.^[4]   She is regarded as a key figure in Chicana literature.^[2]

Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998 she established the Macondo Foundation, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas.^[5] Cisneros currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.

Ms. Cisneros is the recipient of numerous awards in recognition of her literary accomplishments, including the MacArthur Fellowship, two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships for fiction and poetry, the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and a Texas Medal of the Arts Award.

Some of her books include;  The House on Mango Street, Loose Woman, Woman Hollering Creek, Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento and My Wicked, Wicked Ways.  

Cisneros is absolutely one of my favorite authors and poets.  Her words are alive unlike many writers/poets that just use them. Near the back in her volume of poetry, Loose Woman, lies ‘Vino Tinto’.   It’s great writing.  If you have the time to drive to Cortez tomorrow evening you won’t be disappointed.   JR