Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros (1954 - ) is an American writer, best known for The House on Mango Street. Cisneros won the National Medal of Arts in 2015.
- Sanda Cisneros WebsiteSandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist whose work explores the lives of the working-class.
- Sandra Cisneros: BritannicaSandra Cisneros, (born December 20, 1954, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American short-story writer and poet best known for her groundbreaking evocation of Mexican American life in Chicago.
- Sandra Cisneros: Poetry FoundationPoet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, and children’s author Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois, the only daughter in a family with six sons.
Research & Reference
- Sandra Cisneros: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Sandra Cisneros. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- A Guide to the Sandra Cisneros Papers, 1954-2014The Sandra Cisneros Papers span 1954-2014 and are divided into twenty-seven series that document her entire life and literary career up until the archives acquisition in 2015.
- Sandra Cisneros Collection: Amherst CollegeThis collection includes typescripts or photocopied typescripts of six stories that eventually appeared in Woman Hollering Creek (Random House, 1991), one unpublished story, an unpublished speech, an interview, and a biographical sketch. The collection also includes a bound volume of part of Cisneros' latest novel, Caramelo, distributed to friends for comment about eighteen months before publication.
Streaming Media
- Episode 8: The Pioneers: Sandra Cisneros, Neil Patrick Harris, Gloria SteinemDiscover how Neil Patrick Harris, Gloria Steinem and Sandra Cisneros are connected to pioneers who broke new ground and paved the way for their modern-day descendants to continue shaping our culture. Distributed by PBS Distribution.
- Sandra Cisneros: An InterviewIn this 2002 interview, award-winning poet and writer Sandra Cisneros talks about her novel "Caramelo,” the story of a Mexican family with members and memories on both sides of the U.S. border. Original broadcast date: October 15, 2002.
Author's Works & Perspectives
The House on Mango Street
The best-selling coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes--sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous--Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
Caramelo
The celebrated author ofThe House on Mango Streetgives us an extraordinary new novel, told in language of blazing originality: a multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancy–the very stuff of life. Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl, makers. The striped caramelo rebozo is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip–a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels–from Chicago to “the other side”: Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next. We travel from the Mexico City that was the “Paris of the New World” to the music-filled streets of Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties–and, finally, to Lala’s own difficult adolescence in the not-quite-promised land of San Antonio, Texas. Caramelois a romantic tale of homelands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. Vivid, funny, intimate, historical, it is a brilliant work destined to become a classic: a major new novel from one of our country’s most beloved storytellers.
Sandra Cisneros's the House on Mango Street
In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros draws on her own experience as a Hispanic woman writer facing obstacles in a patriarchal community resistant to change. Published in 1984 to instantaneous acclaim, the book is made up of lyrical passages, interconnected vignettes, and meditations and observations that resemble prose poems. Cisneros's structurally and thematically bold work explores the often violent coming of age of a young Mexican-American woman.