House On Mango Street

by SANDRA CISNEROS

Sandra Cisneros creates a world through a series of interlocking vignettes in this slim but rich novel of a Latina girl coming of age in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago. In this playfully imagined, lyrically written book, we grow to know not only the narrator and central character Esperanza, but all the people who inhabit her world—her family, neighbors, friends, and schoolmates. Esperanza’s voice is intimate, full of life and wonder. We experience her hopes, dreams, joys, fears, and challenges in chapters with titles such as Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark, Born Bad, A Smart Cookie, Darius and the Clouds, Hips, and Linoleum Roses. We learn how Esperanza, through her spirit and imagination, invents new possibilities for her life, possibilities which give her a freedom and power to reach beyond the limits of her neighborhood. Cisneros gives us a voice whose story introduces us to an American life richer in human relationships than in material wealth, a voice which engages with the challenges and joys of that disparity, and as a result, comes into her own.

SANDRA CISNEROS BIOGRAPHY

Sandra Cisneros' biography is reproduced below as it appears on her authorized web site,
http://www.sandracisneros.com/home.html

I was born in Chicago in 1954, the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children. I studied at Loyola University of Chicago (B.A. English 1976) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A. Creative Writing 1978). My 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 1991); a children's book, Hairs/Pelitos (Alfred A. Knopf 1994); and two novels, The House on Mango Street (Vintage 1991) and Caramelo (Knopf 2002).

Caramelo was selected as notable book of the year by several journals including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Times. It was also nominated for the Orange Prize in England. My novels have been selected for One City/One Book projects in numerous communities including Los Angeles, Miami, Fort Worth, El Paso, and Milwaukee. House on Mango Street has sold over two million copies and is required reading in classrooms across the country, including elementary, middle, high school, and university-level.

Woman Hollering Creek was awarded the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction of 1991, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. It was also selected as a noteworthy book of the year by The New York Times and the American Library Journal, and nominated Best Book of Fiction for 1991 by the Los Angeles Times.

Loose Woman won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association's 1995 Regional Book Award in the poetry category.

Other awards include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1995; a Texas Medal of the Arts Award, 2003; an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Loyola University, Chicago, 2002; an honorary Doctor of Letters from the State University of New York at Purchase, 1993; two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships for fiction and poetry, 1988, 1982; the Roberta Holloway Lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley, 1988; the Chicano Short Story Award from the University of Arizona, 1986; the Before Columbus American Book Award, 1985; the Texas Institute of Letters Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, 1984; and an Illinois Artists Grant, 1984.

My books have been translated into over a dozen languages, including Spanish, Galician, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, and, most recently, into Greek, Thai, and Serbo-Croatian.

In the past I worked as a teacher and counselor to high-school dropouts, as an artist-in-the schools where I 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.

I currently earn my living by my pen. I live in San Antonio, Texas, in a violet house filled with many creatures, little and large.