Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros

Many of Sandra’s inspirations come from her

early life experiences. She grew up in a family

of 6 brothers, and she was the only girl. This

brought her a feeling of isolation. Also she

spent a lot of time traveling back and forth

from the United States to Mexico which gave

her a sense of "always straddling two

countries ... but not belonging to either

culture.”

A List of Sandra’s Work:•My Wicked Ways •House on Mango Street•Caramelo •Woman Holler Creek and Other Stories •Loose Women •Hails/Pelltos•Vintage Cisneros

The House on Mango

Street

Summary: Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl, is ashamed of the house she and her family live in and dreams of one day taking them to the type of home she finds acceptable. Told through a series of vignettes, Esperanza illustrates her relationship with her family and neighbors, and describes the people and structures around “the house on Mango street.”

Awards: American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation

“This book has many layers of meaning, both literal and symbolic, and can be understood by young adult readers of all ages. Cisneros’ poetic, stream-of-consciousness style, keen insights, and matter-of-fact assertions make this book highly readable and very memorable. Each short chapter is almost self-contained, dense, and lyrical as poetry.”- The College of Education at the University of Texas (at Austin)

http://www.edb.utexas.edu/resources/booksR4teens/book_reviews/book_reviews.php?book_id=52

My Wicked Wicked Ways Written in a collection of poems, each of which resemble a short story, Cisneros

writes about her native Chicago, her travels in Europe, and sexual guilt resulting from her strict Catholic upbringing.    The first parts of the story immerse the reader in the Chicana homefront, including the poet's own place in it. The remaining sections illustrate the author's world as it develops and becomes more cosmopolitan.

Hailed as “not only a gifted writer but an absolutely essential one” (New York Times Book review) Sandra Cisneros has firmly established herself as an author of electrifying talent. Here are verses, comic and sad, radiantly pure and plainspoken, that reveal why her stories have been praised for their precision and musicality of language.

The book’s first section captures the guileless sing-song of a schoolgirl. There’s a cold baby in a satin box, “like a valentine,” in the corner of Lucy’s pink living room, and there’s sick, sad Abuelito, “who used to laugh like the letter k.” By the second section, the girl has become a lover, “the notorious/ one/ leg wrapped/ around/ the door.” Her girlfriend chugs Pabst in redneck bars, and her father warns her that a Sandra Cisneros in Mexico “was arrested for audacious crimes/ that began by disobeying fathers. ”The third section is a handful of postcards from exotic places. She walks alone under stars through a field of poppies in the south of France. She muses to lovers, and to lovers who might have been. She drags furniture out of a burning house on the island of Hydra, and praises that “paradise of symmetry,” the derriere of Michelangelo’s “David.” The book closes with a series of love poems that are richly sensual and often furious. The affair, with its many good-byes, is angular and adulterous: “you who never admitted a public grace./ Weof the half-dark who were unbrave.” Cisneros has written a prefatory poem that is worth the price of the book, a terrific psychic summary of the years that created these poems. “I chucked the life/ my father’s plucked for me,” she explains, “ . . . winched the door with poetry and fled.”

Woman Hollering Creek

Cleofilas Enriqueta Deleon Hernandez believes she will live happily ever after when her father consents to her marriage to Juan Pedro. She leaves her father and six brothers in Mexico and drives to “el otro lado” with Juan Pedro to start a new life. They move to a ramshackle house in a dusty little Texas town. Across a stream called Woman Hollering Creek, Cleofilas soon finds that she has left the boring yet peaceful life she shared with her father and six brothers for the tumultuous, lonely, desperate life of a woman with an abusive husband.

A collection of stories whose characters give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border. The women in these stories offer tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collection of short stories told through Latina voices on both sides of the U.S. - Mexico border. The stories deal with a range of topics, from a young girl's thoughts and reflections on friendship, family, and growing up in "My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn," "Eleven," and "Mericans" to the more mature reflections on love and relationships in stories such as "Woman Hollering Creek," "Remember the Alamo," and "Never Marry a Mexican." Cisneros constructs her characters as subjects of experience; each story takes on a distinct voice to represent the age, location, and condition of its narrator and its characters. Yet the collection is unified by the culturally, regionally, and socio-historically located voices that Cisneros creates through her often informal, always fluid prose.

Caramelo Summary: Celaya Reyes is the

youngest of seven children in her Mexican- American family. Each summer Celaya and her family ventured from their home in Chicago to her grandmother’s house in Mexico City. Throughout the book Celaya recounts stories from her trips, along with those she has heard from her father or other members of her family. With each story Celaya begins to understand a little more about herself and her life.

Awards: Chosen as Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Times. Awarded the 2005 Premio Napoli and nominated for several other prestigious literary awards.

“Caramelo is enchanting. Soulful, sophisticated and skeptical, full of great one-liners…it is one of those novels that blithely leap across the border between literary and popular fiction. “ - Valerie Sayers, director of the creative writing program at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels.

http://www.suite101.com/content/book-review-caramelo-by-sandra-cisneros-a70926

Interviews with Sandra Cisneros

http://www.missourireview.org/content/dynamic/view_text.php?text_id=1093

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/conversation/july-dec02/cisneros_10-15.html

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=1866475&m=1868601

Teaching Resources on

the Web

http://urbandreams.ousd.k12.ca.us/language_arts/core/09/cisneros/index.html

http://www.lessonplanet.com/search?keywords=sandra+cisneros&media=lesson

Discover classroom writing exercises, reviews,

related books and short stories, and lesson plans!

Citations

http://www.flipkart.com/my-wicked-ways-sandra-cisneros-book-0679418210

http://www.enotes.com/woman-hollering

http://www.enotes.com/my-wicked-wicked-ways-salem/my-wicked-wicked-ways

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780679738565.html

http://www.edb.utexas.edu/resources/booksR4teens/book_reviews/book_reviews.php?book_id=129

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cisneros/bio.htm

http://www.sandracisneros.com/bio.php