Sandra Cisneros
Photo: © Keith Dannemiller
Sandra Cisneros is a celebrated poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, national and international book awards, including the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. More recently, she received the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized with the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; recently, she was honored by the Poetry Foundation with a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets and one of the nation’s largest literary prizes, in recognition of her outstanding lifetime achievement. In addition to her writing, Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two nonprofits she founded: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. As a single woman, she made the choice to have books instead of children. A citizen of both the United States and Mexico, Cisneros currently lives in San Miguel de Allende and makes her living by her pen. She has authored over ten books in different genres and translations, including the acclaimed, best-selling The House on Mango Street (Knopf, 1994) and, most recently, the poetry collection Woman Without Shame (Knopf, 2022).
