Research Guides: Sandra Cisneros: Biography

Sandra Cisneros (Born on December 20, 1954)

Cisneros’s fiction and poetry are widely anthologized, and The House on Mango Street is frequently taught in schools and colleges. Random House issued a one-volume selection from her fiction and poetry, Vintage Cisneros, in 2004. She has won a number of honors, including two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships for fiction and poetry (1988, 1982), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1995), and a Texas Medal of the Arts (2003). She has received several grants and guest lectureships, and honorary degrees from Loyola University, Chicago (2002), and the State University of New York at Purchase (1993). Caramelo (2002) was named a notable book of the year in several newspapers, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. Continue . . .

Source: Heller, Terry. “Sandra Cisneros.” Critical Survey of American Literature, Dec. 2016, pp. 537–543.. From Literary Reference Center Plus database.

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The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

Book Collection

Resources

The Women Figures and the Notion of 'Home' in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street Sandra Cisneros is one of the most prominent writers of American and Hispanic literary world. Her successful novel titled The House on Mango Street recounts the life, the milieu and the compelling experiences encountered by women from the eyes of Esperanza, the protagonist of the novel. However, there are a large number of resemblances between houses and the women figures. Esperanza thinking that she does not belong to there at the beginning of the novel is determined to make the women on Mango Street educated and optimistic about their future.
Women Hollering Transfronteriza Feminisms The publication of texts by Chicana feminists in the 1980s offered an alternative mapping of feminist literary cartographies and subject positions. This article examines the work of contemporary Chicana writer, Sandra Cisneros, whose literary text enacts a practice of Chicana feminism that engages with a transnational, transfronteriza practice of feminismo popular, which literally translates as 'popular feminism'. This type of border feminism articulates a feminist materialist aesthetics that enables us to re-examine an emergent formation of feminism on the border, a formation characterized by specific types of movements of Mexican women across geopolitical boundaries and borders. The complex movements of this transnational Chicana feminism are announced in the story 'Woman Hollering Creek', which complicates the binarisms of the metropolitan opposed to the rural, the core and periphery, and militates against a reductionist opposition of First World versus Third World. I argue that armed with a transfrontera feminism, the protagonist Cleofilas and her peers can resist the power of a transnational media. This story changes the subject of dominant, patriarchal discourse and lets readers imagine how Chicana transfrontera feminism and Mexican feminismo popular can converge in other spaces and under other circumstances to produce socially nuanced global Chicana Mexicana coalitions.
Interview with Sandra Cisneros Interview by The Chicago Public Library.
Report from Santa Fe: Sandra Cisneros The celebrated and multi-award winning author Sandra Cisneros, writer of two highly celebrated novels, “The House on Mango Street” and “Caramelo.” This year marks the 25th Anniversary of “The House on Mango Street.”

From Films On Demand database:

American Passages: A Literary Survey - Sandra Cisneros Listen to excerpts from "House on Mango Street." Cisneros notes that she was discovering feminism for her students and herself as she wrote.
Sandra Cisneros: An Interview In 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
Finding Your Roots: Sandra Cisneros Cisneros is the only girl of seven siblings; she was born in 1954 to Elvira Cordero and Alfredo Cisneros. Cisneros draws on her life and mixes fact with fiction in her writing. Distributed by PBS Distribution.
Sandra Cisneros: Caramelo In Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros tells the story of the Reyes family who has members and memories on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. In this interview, Cisneros discusses the context of her novel, her personal connection to the characters, learning her family history, and more.