Sandra Cisneros - 1954
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Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas, Texas
I. Early Childhood and Education
Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954, the only daughter in a family of six boys. Her father was Mexican, her mother Chicana. Because her grandmother was so attached to Cisneros' father, Cisneros frequently moved back to Mexico during her childhood. Cisneros recalls that she moved into neighborhoods reminiscent of France after WWII. This shuffle helped develop Cisneros into an introverted yet, highly perceptive person.
Cisneros studied at Loyola University of Chicago and received her B.A. in 1976. Two years later she attended the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. There she discovered just how different her socioeconomic background was from her classmates. She wrote from her perspective as a Mexican woman. While attending the university, she taught at an alternative school for high-school dropouts.
II. Cisneros' Works and Awards
In 1980, Cisneros published her first work, Bad Boys, a series of poems. For the next two years she recruited and counseled minority students at Loyola University of Chicago. She received the National Endowment for the Arts fellow in 1982. In 1984, The House on Mango Street was published, and Cisneros was the literature director in the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio.
Cisneros received the American Book Award for this work one year later and won the Paisano Dobie Fellowship Award in 1986. She published her second work, My Wicked Wicked Ways, one year later. From 1987 to 1999 she was a guest professor at California State University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Irvine; University of Michigan; and University of New Mexico. She published Woman Hollering Creek in 1991 and received the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She also published Pelitos, a juvenile bilingual book, and Loose Woman, in 1994. Her most recent award was the MacArthur Fellow Award in 1995. Cisneros currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, in the King William National Historic District.
This essay was submitted by a student of Sheryl Row, a teacher at Jesuit College Preparatory of Dallas, Texas.