Sandra Cisneros will deliver the address at Franklin & Marshall’s 238th Commencement and also will receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Sandra 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.

Sandra 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.

Sandra 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 between people’s views on immigration policy.

Sandra 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 delivers her address, titled “A River of Voices: Documenting the Undocumented,” at F&M Common Hour. Cisneros spent two days on F&M’s campus as the 2019 Mueller Fellow.

Sandra Cisneros with F&M Trustee Emeriti, Paul A. Mueller, Jr., Esq., and F&M President Barbara Altmann. The Mueller Fellowship Endowment was established in 1980 by the Mueller family to bring distinguished national speakers to F&M to participate in conversations with the campus community.

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