Nessie School of Languages

Sandra Cisneros biography

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954, to a
Mexican father and a Chicana mother; she has six brothers and is the only
daughter in the family. She moved frequently during her childhood and visited
Mexico often, to visit her paternal grandmother. Like Esperanza, the main
character in The
House on Mango Street, Cisneros recalls these moves as painful
experiences: "’Because we moved so much, and always in neighborhoods that
appeared like France after World War II–empty lots and burned-out-buildings–I
retreated inside myself’" (Sagel 74). Cisneros found an outlet in writing;
in high school she wrote poetry and was the literary magazine editor. She
earned a BA in English from Loyola University of Chicago in 1976. However, it
wasn’t until working on her master’s degree at the University of Iowa Writers’
Workshop in the late 1970’s that she says she found her particular voice, as a
working-class, Mexican-American woman with an independent sexuality. The
experience of recognizing her difference from other students at Iowa eventually
led to the writing of The House on Mango Street, which was published
by Arte Publico Press of Houston in 1984 and won the Before Columbus
Foundation’s American Book Award in in 1985. Returning to Chicago after
graduate school, Cisneros worked various jobs that engaged with the Chicano
community, including teaching high school drop outs; she also returned to
Loyola University as an administrative assistant. In the late 1980s, she
divided her time between California and Texas, earning a variety of fellowships
and guest lectureships. She won two fellowships from the National Endowment for
the arts, one for fiction (1982) and one for poetry (1987). During this time,
she wrote her first well received book of poetry, My Wicked, Wicked Ways
(1987). She also met her literary agent, Susan Bergholz, who after seeing a
small packet of short stories encouraged Cisneros to develop them into what was
to becomeWoman
Hollering Creek (1991). This collection won the PEN Center West
Award for Best Fiction of 1991, the Qualitiy Paperback Book Club New Voices
Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and
was selected as a noteworthy book of the year by The New York Times
and the American
Library Journal. In 1995, Cisneros won the prestigious MacArthur
Foundation Fellowship; one hour after winning the $225,000 grant, she was back
in San Antonio–where she has made her home in this decade–lecturing to
students at a local arts center. Much as the writer Esperanza promises to
return to Mango Street at the end of that novel, Cisneros has continually
returned to her community, showing the powerful connecton between art,
politics, and everyday life.

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