Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The House on Mango Street | 1984 |
| Caramelo | 2002 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Have You Seen Marie? | 2012 |
| Puro Amor | 2018 |
| Martita, I Remember You | 2021 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories | 1991 |
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
| Bad Boys | 1980 |
| My Wicked, Wicked Ways | 1987 |
| Loose Woman | 1994 |
| Woman Without Shame | 2022 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| Hairs / Pelitos | 1994 |
| Bravo Bruno! | 2011 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| A House of My Own: Stories from My Life | 2015 |
About Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros is an American novelist, poet and short story writer, born in Chicago on 20 December 1954. She is best known for her first novel, “The House on Mango Street” (1984), and the story collection “Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” (1991), and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.
Cisneros grew up as the only daughter among seven children in a family of Mexican heritage, and her childhood was shaped by repeated moves between Chicago and Mexico City. She took a BA at Loyola University Chicago in 1976 and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978, then taught former high-school dropouts at the Latino Youth High School in Chicago. She has also worked as a counsellor, a college recruiter and an arts administrator.
“The House on Mango Street” draws on the Humboldt Park neighbourhood on Chicago’s West Side, where her family bought a home when she was eleven. It won the American Book Award in 1985, has been translated around the world and is widely taught in American classrooms as a coming-of-age novel. Its success brought her a run of writer-in-residence posts at universities. “Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” followed in 1991 and won the PEN Center West Award for best fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award.
Her poetry began with the chapbook “Bad Boys” (1980) and continued with “My Wicked, Wicked Ways” (1987) and “Loose Woman” (1994). A second novel, “Caramelo” (2002), was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Cisneros received a MacArthur fellowship in 1995, the National Medal of Arts at a ceremony in 2016 and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature in 2019.
In 1998 she started the Macondo Writers Workshop, which began in her kitchen, and she later set up the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, named after her father, to support writers connected to Texas. After many years in San Antonio she now lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Her later books include the memoir “A House of My Own” (2015), the dual-language story “Martita, I Remember You” (2021) and “Woman Without Shame” (2022), her first book of poems in twenty-eight years. An opera based on “The House on Mango Street”, with music by Derek Bermel and a libretto by Cisneros and Bermel, was given its world premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).