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Sandra Cisneros

Nationality: American
Ethnicity: Hispanic
Genre(s): Poetry; Essays
Award(s):
– National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1982, 1988
– American Book Award from Before Columbus Foundation, 1985, for The House on Mango Street
– Paisano Dobie Fellowship, 1986 First and second prize in Segundo  Concurso Nacional del Cuento Chicano, sponsored by University of Arizona Lannan Foundation Literary Award, 1991
– HD.L, State University of New York at Purchase, 1993 MacArthur fellow, 1995

Born December 20, 1954, Chicago IL.
Education:
Loyola University, B.A., 1976;
University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A., 1978.
Memberships:
PEN, Mujeres por la paz (member and organizer; a women’s peace group).
Career:
Writer.
Latino Youth Alternative High School, Chicago IL, teacher, 1978-80; Loyola University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, college recruiter and counselor for minority students, 1981-82;
Foundation Michael Karolyi, Vence, France, artist in residence, 1983; Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio, TX, literature director, 1984-85;
Guest professor, California State University, Chico, 1987-88, University of California, Berkeley, 1988, University of California, Irvine, 1990, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1990, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1991.

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
Bad Boys (poems), Mango Publications, 1980.
The House on Mango Street, Arte Publico, 1984. My Wicked, Wicked Ways, (poems), Third Woman Press, 1987.
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, (stories), Random House, 1991.
Hairs: Pelitos (juvenile; bilingual), illustrated by Terry Ybanez, Knopf, 1994.
Loose Woman (poems), Knopf,1994.
Contributor to various periodicals, including Imagine, Contact II, Glamour, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice and Revista Chicano-Riquena. “Sidelights”

With only a handful of poetry and short story collections, Sandra Cisneros has garnered wide critical acclaim as well as popular success. Drawing heavily upon her childhood experiences and ethnic heritage as the daughter of a Mexican father and Chicana mother, Cisneros addresses poverty, cultural suppression, self-identity, and gender roles in her fiction and poetry. She creates characters who are distinctly Latina/o and often isolated from mainstream American culture by emphasizing dialogue and sensory imagery over traditional narrative structures. Best known for The House on Mango Street, a volume of loosely structured vignettes that has been classified as both a short story collection and a series of prose poems, Cisneros seeks to create an idiom that integrates both prosaic and poetic syntax.

“Cisneros is a quintessentially American writer, unafraid of the sentimental; avoiding the clichés of magical realism, her work bridges the gap between Anglo and Hispanic, ” remarked Aamer Hussein in the Times Literary Supplement. Born in Chicago, Cisneros was the only daughter among seven children. Concerning her childhood, Cisneros recalled that because her brothers attempted to control her and expected her to assume a traditional female role, she often felt like she had “seven fathers.” The family frequently moved between the United States and Mexico because of her father’s homesickness for his native country and his devotion to his mother who lived there. Consequently, Cisneros often felt homeless and displaced. She began to read extensively, finding comfort in such works as Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Cisneros periodically wrote poems and stories throughout her childhood and adolescence, but it was not until she attended the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop in the late 1970s that she realized her experiences as a Latina woman were unique and outside the realm of dominant American culture. Following this realization, Cisneros decided to write about conflicts directly related to her upbringing, including divided cultural loyalties, feelings of alienation, and degradation associated with poverty. Incorporating these concerns into The House on Mango Street, a work that took nearly five years to complete, Cisneros created the character Esperanza, a poor Latina adolescent who longs for a room of her own and a house of which she can be proud. Esperanza ponders the disadvantages of choosing marriage over education, the importance of writing as an emotional release, and the sense of confusion associated with growing up. In the story “Hips, ” for example, Esperanza agonizes over the repercussions of her body’s physical changes: “One day you wake up and there they are. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the key in the ignition. Ready to take you where?

Written in what Booklist contributor Penelope Mesic called “a loose and deliberately simple style, halfway between a prose poem and the awkwardness of semi literacy, ” the pieces in The House on Mango Street won praise for their lyrical narratives, vivid dialogue, and powerful descriptions. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-two narratives revolving around numerous Mexican-American characters living near San Antonio, Texas. Ranging from a few paragraphs to several pages, the stories in this volume contain the interior monologues of individuals who have been assimilated into American culture despite their sense of loyalty to Mexico. In “Never Marry a Mexican, ” for example, a young Latina begins to feel contempt for her white lover because of her emerging feelings of inadequacy and cultural guilt. And in the title story, a Mexican woman deluded by fantasies of a life similar to that of American soap operas ventures into Texas to marry an American. When she discovers that her husband and marriage share little in common with her TV dreams, she is forced to reappraise her life.

Reviewers praised the author’s vivid characters and distinctive prose. Nothing Cisneros’ background as a poet, Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Barbara Kingsolver remarked that “Cisneros has added length and dialogue and a hint of plot to her poems and published them in a stunning collection.” Writing in The Nation, Patricia Hart exclaimed, “Cisneros breathes narrative life into her adroit, poetic descriptions, making them mature, fully formed works of fiction.”

Hart also commended Cisneros’s “range of characters” as “broad and lively.” Time reviewers Peter S. Prescott and Karen Springen averred, “Noisily, wittily, always compassionately, Cisneros surveys woman’s condition-a condition that is both precisely Latina and general to women everywhere.” Kingsolver, who stated that “nearly every sentence contains an explosive sensory image, ” concluded that Cisneros “takes no prisoners and has not made a single compromise in her language.” Similarly, Bebe Moore Campbell, discussing the work in the New York Times Book Review, felt that “the author seduces with precise, spare prose and creates unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page and hang out with for a little while.” Prescott and Springen agreed that Woman Hollering Creek “should make Cisneros’s reputation as a major author.”

Although Cisneros is noted primarily for her fiction, her poetry has also garnered attention. In My Wicked Wicked Ways, published in 1987, Cisneros writes about her native Chicago, her travels in Europe, and, as reflected in the title, sexual guilt resulting from her strict Catholic upbringing. A collection of sixty poems, each of which resemble a short story, this work further evidences Cisneros’s penchant for merging various genres.

Bloomsbury Review critic Gary Soto explained: “Cisneros’s poems are intrinsically narrative, but not large, meandering paragraphs. She writes deftly with skill and idea, in the `show-me-don’t-tell-me’ vein, and her points leave valuable impressions.” Writing in Belles Lettres, Andrea Lockett commented, “Particularly alluring here are the daring, perceptive, and sometimes rough-hewn expressions about being a modern woman.” In her 1994 poetry collection, Loose Woman, Cisneros offers a portrait of a fiercely proud, independent woman of Mexican heritage. “Cisneros probes the extremes of perceptions and negotiates the boundary regions that define the self, ” remarked Susan Smith Nash in a World Literature Today review of the collection. Discussing her poetry with David Mehegan of the Boston Globe, Cisneros stated that her poetry “is almost a journal of daily life as woman and writer. I’m always aware of being on the frontier. Even if I’m writing about Paris or Sarajevo, I’m still writing about it from this border position that I was raised in.” In her poetry, as in all her works, Cisneros incorporates Latino dialect, impressionistic metaphors, and social commentary in ways that reveal the fears and doubts unique to Latinas and women in general.

She told Mary B. W. Tabor in a New York Times interview: “I am a woman and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power. They are the things that give it sabor [flavor], the things that give it picante [spice].”

Author’s database Gale