Sandra Cisneros doesn’t write in drafts, but rather, a patchwork of thoughts. 

“I write in little pieces. I don't write them in linear order. I arrange them like buttons in a jar,” said Cisneros, acclaimed poet, short story writer, novelist and essayist with a particular focus on the working class.

Cisneros will add a few Diplomat blue buttons to her collection at Franklin & Marshall College’s 238th Commencement when she addresses members of the Class of 2025. 

No stranger to F&M, Commencement speaker Sandra Cisneros spent two days on campus as the 2019 Mueller Fellow.

The lone daughter among six brothers in a family of Mexican heritage, Cisneros found clarity sifting through the Chicago Public Library card catalogue as a child.

“I ran into a card that was very raggedy, very worn down, dog-eared, the typeface print was all smudged. It was a card that many people had touched,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, that must be a good book.’ You have to see in your mind’s eye what your dream is. I saw the spine. I saw the cover. I saw my name on it. And I said, ‘That’s what I want.’”

Despite that defining moment, imposter syndrome nearly prevented Cisneros from pursuing professional writing after graduate school.

“I have to admit that my career was filled with fear,” Cisneros said from her home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. 

“I was very timid and felt like I didn't belong in the university. I heard about a part-time job in the Mexican neighborhood in Chicago. Out of sheer intimidation, my career began working with high school dropouts,” she said.

But something extraordinary happened. 

“I learned so much from my students. I gathered up their stories and wrote my first book,” Cisneros said.

That book, “The House on Mango Street,” reached its 40th publication anniversary in 2024. 

Composed of vignettes, the novella weaves together stories from the perspective of Esperanza, a young Chicana growing up in the Chicago barrio.

“I wrote first out of anger and depression. When I was working with the students, I felt so heartsick about their lives. I started putting them in an autobiographical neighborhood,” Cisneros said. 

"You have to see in your mind’s eye what your dream is."

Sandra Cisneros

Her subsequent novel, “Caramelo” (2002), follows four generations of a Mexican-American family moving back and forth in time and location from Chicago to Mexico City. In 2022, she published “Woman Without Shame: Poems,” her first collection of poetry in three decades. 

Cisneros’ gift for compelling narrative was evident in her previous visit to F&M. She spent two days on campus as the 2019 Mueller Fellow. Her lecture, titled “A River of Voices: Documenting the Undocumented,” earned a standing ovation from the crowd.

For Cisneros, writing is more than a craft. It’s a higher calling.

“It's like a manda – an assignment from God,” she said. “It’s part of my spirit walk. I'm a writer and I channel a God force when I write, if I can just get my fear out of the way. Even if we are atheists, we have to believe in our highest self.”

Cisneros hopes F&M seniors depart the May 10 ceremony feeling similarly empowered.

“We are each of us channelers and conduits to the light,” she said. “That essentially is what I want people to go away with: That we are capable of so much.” 

Sandra 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 many others. This year, the National Book Critics Circle awarded Cisneros the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. She has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through founding two nonprofits: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation.

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