Sandra Cisneros, award-winning poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist, will visit Judson College March 30, 2017. She will give a presentation followed by a Q&A session at 7:00pm in Alumnae Auditorium on the Judson College campus in Marion, Ala. A reception and book signing will follow in Archibald Hall.
Cisneros’s work explores working-class Latino life in America, particularly Chicago, where she grew up, and where she set her well-known coming-of-age novel, The House on Mango Street. The House on Mango Street, first published in 1984, won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1985, and is required reading in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the nation. It has sold over five million copies in the United States since its initial publication.
Her memoir, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, describes her experience leaving home–her parents’ house–in Chicago. A House of My Own was published in October 2015.
Cisneros will read from both The House on Mango Street and A House of My Own at the Judson presentation.
Cisneros’s other works include a chapbook of poetry, Bad Boys (Mango Press 1980); two full-length poetry books, My Wicked Wicked Ways (Third Woman 1987, Random House 1992) and Loose Woman (Alfred A. Knopf 1994); a collection of stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Random House l991); a children’s book, Hairs/Pelitos (Alfred A. Knopf 1994); and two novels, The House on Mango Street (Vintage 1991), Caramelo (Knopf 2002), Have You Seen Marie? (Knopf 2012), and Bravo, Bruno (La Nuova Frontiera 2012). Vintage Cisneros, published in 2003, is a compilation of selections from her works.
Cisneros was born in Chicago in l954, the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children. She studied at Loyola University of Chicago (B.A. English 1976) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A. Creative Writing 1978).
Cisneros has worked as a teacher and counselor to high-school dropouts, as an artist-in-the schools, a college recruiter, an arts administrator, and as a visiting writer at a number of universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a founder of awards and foundations that serve writers, including the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation.
Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, and several honorary doctorates and book awards nationally and internationally. Recently Cisneros received Chicago’s Fifth Star Award, 2015 and the PEN Center’s 2016 Award in non-fiction for A House of My Own. In 2016 Cisneros received National Medal of the Arts, awarded to her by President Barack Obama.
Sandra Cisneros’s books have been translated into over twenty languages, including Spanish, Galician, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, and, most recently, into Egyptian, Greek, Iranian, Thai, and Serbo-Croatian.
Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico. She currently lives in central Mexico and earns her living by her pen.
The event is sponsored by Judson College’s Concert/Lecture Series, Project Curiosity Critical Thinking Series, Departments of English and Drama, and the Office of Faith-Based Service and Learning.
For more information about the event, contact Dr. Billie Jean Young, Associate Professor of Fine and Performing Arts, at (205) 515-2904 or byoung@judson.edu.
Download the event flyer here.
Photo: Sandra Cisneros © Macarena Hernández