Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisnerosis an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Streetand her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates 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, and is...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 December 1954
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
I was reading all these male writers who were doing wild and wonderful things. It gave me permission to experiment.
I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.
I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.
[Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.
I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet.
Those of us who are writers and have to perform to communities that aren't used to coming to book events, I would recommend taking some theater.
I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.
I know there are a lot of women who are afraid of driving on highways.
To tell you the truth, I think it's about that we shouldn't get our driver's licenses till real late in life.
Even if you don't believe in God, you have to believe in love.
If you have potato chips, that means, "Who's coming over?"Wealthy people - white people who're wealthy - have a bag of potato chips that's folded over with a clip. "What? There's some left over?" In my house, if there was a bag of potato chips, we'd pour it in a bowl and everybody would just dip in till it was gone.
To this day, on my cheat days from my diet, which are New Year's Eve and my birthday, I buy luxury foods that are very indicative of my class.
What do we call our Harlem Renaissance? Maybe in the future, it won't be just Latino, maybe it'll be more multi-multi, because, you know, people are such fusions now, of so many different cultures.
I always have to have sweet and salty. I know some of you are going to say, "Oh, I tried dates. I hate them." That's probably because you had the ones that were on the shelf for three years. Go to some healthy place and get the fresh ones, and you will just love them. You'll start eating them and think they're so good.