Sandra Cisneros Biography
Sandra Cisneros Biography: Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros, herself, attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell.She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.
Sandra Cisneros Early Life
Sandra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954 in Chicago, Illinois. Although her parents met in Chicago, they were both from Mexico. They had seven children, but Cisneros was the only girl. A year after she was born, her parents had another daughter, but she died as a baby. When Cisneros was ten years old, she wrote her first poem. However, she did not write any more poetry until she was in high school. While in school, she was an active writer and was known as “the poet.” After high school, Cisneros attended Loyola University of Chicago. In her third year of school she took a creative writing class and decided to continue studying writing. She graduated in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. Cisneros continued on to the University of Iowa where she graduated in 1978 with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. After Cisneros graduated with her second degree, she returned to Chicago. She became a teacher and counselor at the Latino Youth Alternative High School, where she taught students that dropped out of school. A few years later, Cisneros returned to Loyola University of Chicago as an administrative assistant. Later on, she worked at many universities including; California State University at Chico, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and the University of New Mexico.
Sandra Cisneros family
Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 20, 1954, to a family of Mexican heritage, the third of seven children. The only surviving daughter, she considered herself the “odd number, in a set of men.” Cisneros’s great-grandfather had played the piano for the Mexican president and was from a wealthy background, but he gambled away his family’s fortune.Her paternal grandfather, Enrique, was a veteran of the Mexican Revolution, and he used what money he had saved to give her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral, the opportunity to go to college. However, after failing classes, due to what Cisneros called his “lack of interest” in studying, Alfredo ran away to the United States, in an effort to escape his father’s anger. While roaming the southern United States with his brother, Alfredo visited Chicago, where he met Elvira Cordero Anguiano. After getting married, the pair settled in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Cisneros’s biographer, Robin Ganz, writes that she acknowledges her mother’s family came came from a very humble background, tracing its roots back to Guanajuato, Mexico, while her father’s was much more “admirable”.
Cisneros currently resides in San Miguel de Allende, a city in central Mexico, but for years, she lived and wrote in San Antonio, Texas, in her briefly controversial “Mexican-pink” home, with “many creatures little and large.”In 1990, when Pilar E. Rodríguez Aranda asked Cisneros, in an interview for the Americas Review, why she has never married or started a family, Cisneros replied, “I’ve never seen a marriage that is as happy as my living alone. My writing is my child, and I don’t want anything to come between us.”She has elaborated, elsewhere, that she enjoys living alone, because it gives her time to think and write,In the introduction to the third edition of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Cisneros wrote: “It’s why I moved from Illinois to Texas. So that the relatives and family would allow me the liberty to disappear into myself. To reinvent myself, if I had to. As Latinas, we have to.
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Sandra Cisneros Career
In addition to being an author and poet, Cisneros has held various academic and teaching positions. In 1978, after finishing her MFA degree, she taught former high-school dropouts at the Latino Youth High School in Chicago. The 1984 publication of The House on Mango Street secured her a succession of writer-in-residence posts at universities in the United States, teaching creative writing at institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan. She was, subsequently, a writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Cisneros has also worked as a college recruiter and as an arts administrator.
Sandra Cisneros Net worth
Sandra Cisneros Net worth: $15 Million