Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954, the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children. She studied at Loyola University of Chicago where she earned B.A. in English and M.F.A in creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Cisneros has worked as a teacher and counselor to high-school dropouts, as an artist-in- the schools where she taught creative writing at every level except first grade and pre- school, 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.

Sandra Cisneros’s books 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.

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.

She is also the president and founder of the Macondo Foundation, an association of socially-engaged writers working to advance creativity, foster generosity, and honor our communities; and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, a grant-giving institution serving Texas writers.

Her latest book, Have You Seen Marie?, set in San Antonio, Texas, is a modern fable for adults with illustrations by renowned artist Ester Hernández.

Currently, Sandra Cisneros is at work on several projects, including a non-fiction book, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, was published on Oct 6, 2015; a collection of fiction, Infinito, a book about writing, Writing in My Pajamas; and a new untitled collection of poetry.