Sandra Cisneros is a noted author and activist who is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico. She is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, author of children’s books, performer and artist who has focused much of her work on the lives of the working class in the U.S.

Perhaps best known for her book, “The House on Mango Street,” Ms. Cisneros has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction, the American Book Award, a National Medal of Arts, and the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship, among other awards. This year, the National Book Critics Circle awarded her the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

Ms. Cisneros is no stranger to the Franklin & Marshall campus. She was selected as F&M’s Mueller Fellow in November 2019. That fellowship was established in 1980 to bring distinguished national speakers to F&M and lead conversations about important issues with the campus community. Her visit, which included discussions with student organizations and in academic classes, culminated in her campus address, “A River of Voices: Documenting the Undocumented.” She performed a dramatic work based on interviews she conducted with individuals across the country to gather their ideas about how to bridge the increasing divide among people’s views on immigration policy.

Ms. Cisneros was born in Chicago, the only daughter in a family of seven children. She now lives in the central Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English at Loyola University of Chicago and her master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa. She has worked as a teacher and counselor to high-school dropouts, a creative writing teacher in elementary school, a college recruiter, an arts administrator, and a visiting writer at several universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Sandra Cisneros, for your award-winning and boundless creativity across a wide variety of literary styles; for the inspiration and instruction you provide to young writers, including many during your 2019 visit to Franklin & Marshall; and for your decades of determination in providing a voice to those often voiceless in our society, Franklin & Marshall College bestows upon you the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters.

Sandra Cisneros, Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. Copyright Keith Dannemiller.

Ms. Cisneros is no stranger to the Franklin & Marshall campus. She was selected as F&M’s Mueller Fellow in November 2019. Her visit, which included discussions with student organizations and in academic classes, culminated in her campus address, “A River of Voices: Documenting the Undocumented.”

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