Cisneros, Sandra (1954–)

Cisneros is a critically acclaimed Chicana-Latina novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist. Born on 20 December 1954, in Chicago to a Mexican father and Mexican American mother, Cisneros received a BA degree from Loyola University in Chicago in 1976 MFA from the University of Iowa in 1978. Her first novel was The House on Mango Street (1983), a series of vignettes told from the perspective of a young girl growing up in Chicago; it has been translated into Spanish by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska and into more than a dozen other languages. In the early twenty-first century it is required reading in secondary schools throughout the United States as well as a staple of many college and university courses and has sold well over two million copies. Both Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) and Caramelo; or, Puro Cuento (2002) were designated as notable books of the year by the New York Times and have been translated into Spanish and many other languages. Cisneros is the recipient of numerous honors, including National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for poetry (1982) and fiction (1988) and the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1995). She founded the Macondo Writing Workshop in1995 and Los Macarturos, a collective of Latino/a MacArthur Fellows, in 1997.

See alsoHispanics in the United States; Literature: Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poetry by Cisneros

Bad Boys. San Jose, CA: Mango Press, 1980.

My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Bloomington, IN: Third Woman Press, 1987.

The Loose Woman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Novels, Stories, and Collections by Cisneros

Hairs/Pelitos. New York: Knopf, 1994. Bilingual children's book translated from the English by Liliana Valenzuela.

Vintage Cisneros. New York: Vintage, 2004.

Secondary Sources

Elliott, Gayle. "An Interview with Sandra Cisneros." Missouri Review; 25, no. 1 (2002): 93-109.

Joysmith, Claire. "Desplazamiento y reconstrucción: "Eyes of Zapata de Sandra Cisneros." In Las formas de nuestras voces: Chicana and Mexicana Writers in Mexico, pp. 167-183. Mexico and Berkeley: CISAN, UNAM and Third Woman Press, 1995.

Mullen, Harryette "'A Silence between Us like a Language': The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek." MELUS 21, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 3-20.

Poniatowska, Elena. "Sandra Cisneros en Tepoztlán." La Jornada, January 24, 2006; "Sandra Cisneros parte II," January 25, 2006.

Rebolledo, Tey Diana. "La Chicana Bandera: Sandra Cisneros in the Public Press—Constructing a Cultural Icon (1996–1999)." In her The Chronicles of Panchita Villa and Other Guerrilleras. Essays on Chicana/Latina Literature and Criticism, pp. 124-128. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Saldivar-Hull, Sonia. "Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics." In Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, ed. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Valenzuela, Liliana. In Caramelo o Puro Cuento. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

                                       Claire Joysmith