Sandra Cisneros

Legendary Author / Poet
National Medal of Arts/ McArthur Genius Awardee
Join our Lifetime Achievement Masquerade Ball honoring Sandra

Chicago native Sandra Cisneros is a short-story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, performer, artist, and activist. She has received numerous honors, including a prestigious National Medal of Arts, created by Congress and bestowed by the President of the United States as the nation’s highest recognition in the arts.

One of seven children, and the only daughter in the family, Cisneros attended Loyola University of Chicago. She graduated in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. Continuing to follow her passion for writing and the arts, she then attended the University of Iowa, where in 1978, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing.

Cisneros returned to Chicago, using her talents to impact young students as a teacher and counselor at the Latino Youth Alternative High School, then as an artist-in-the-schools teaching creative writing, and later as an arts administrator and college recruiter at her alma mater, Loyola University. She went on to serve as a visiting writer at California State University at Chico, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and the University of New Mexico.

In 1980 Cisneros’s first book, Bad Boys, a poetry chapbook, was published by a small press. In 1984, she published The House on Mango Street, which tells the story of a young Latina growing up in Chicago. The following year The House on Mango Street won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Cisneros’s influential novel is now required reading in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country, with more than eight million copies sold since its publication. For the past several years, it has been a selection of the NEA national Big Read program.

Cisneros’s first full-length poetry book, My Wicked Wicked Ways was published in 1987. In 1991, Cisneros published Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a collection of short stories. This book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction of 1991, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. Cisneros has received many other honors, including the Texas Institute of Letters Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and prose, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. More recently, she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

As a 1995 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Cisneros helped organize Los MacArturos—a caucus of Latino awardees united in community service. That work extended into two nonprofits she founded. The Alfred Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, a grant-giving institution, served Texas writers for fifteen years. The Macondo Writers Workshop, with a mission to help and encourage writers who are committed to activism, will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2025. This year, in addition to the honor of becoming a Lincoln Laureate, the highest honor bestowed by the state of Illinois, Cisneros received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. And in July of 2025, an opera based on The House on Mango Street, created in collaboration with composer Derek Bermel, will premiere at The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, NY.