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They say we should never meet our heroes. But perhaps literary heroes are a category unto themselves, because it is a joy to be in community with and introduce Sandra Cisneros, the 2025 recipient of the Harold Washington Literary Award.
Chicago born and raised, Loyola University educated, and an iconic figure in American literature, Sandra Cisneros writes of what she knows: The complexity of being a woman in our deeply patriarchal culture. The challenge of being Latina in a too-often racist society. And the pain of being treated as a stranger in one’s own land.
More than anything Sandra Cisneros reminds us that bearing literary witness can be a powerful political act.
Her fiction is poetic. Her poetry tells stories. And her essays and public statements are candid, bracing and sometimes – and I especially love this - bawdy. This week I’ve been reading her most recent poetry collection,“Woman Without Shame,” and I can almost feel Sandra Cisneros not just casting off but kicking off the expectations placed on women of a certain age.
I initially encountered Sandra Cisneros as a young woman, when I read that classic of Chicana literature, “The House on Mango Street,” which captures a year in the life of Esperanza Cordero, a poor Latina girl who is coming of age in a deeply patriarchal society.
The book is set in an area inspired by Cisneros’s own Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago, which is both geographically close and light years away from Wheaton, Illinois, the small, deeply religious and conservative town in which I grew up.
When I read “The House on Mango Street,” I not only discovered a beautiful, complicated, fraught city that was at that time utterly unfamiliar to me - and is now my beloved home - I found Esperanza and the points of connection that drew me to her: Her desire to write. Her hunger to transcend the station she was born into. And her emerging sense that a world dominated by a certain version of manhood was not a world in which an ambitious young girl – or any young girl, I might argue - could thrive.
This is a powerful aspect of the Cisneros canon: She invites us to encounter characters living lives that may or may not be like our own, while reminding us of what is universal in the human – and especially the female – experience.
Years later, Center for Story & Witness - the organization with which I am affiliated - launched its global testimonial writing program for survivors of gender-based violence and other human rights violations. During our workshops we regularly teach the Cisneros short story “One Holy Night,” in which a 13-year-old girl who is being repeatedly sexually assaulted by a 37-year-old man insists on seeing their encounters not as abuse, but as romance.
It has been extraordinary to see how this single Sandra Cisneros story has awed, and vexed, and inspired writers from across the globe who participate in our workshops.
Sometimes they see themselves in this young girl and her refusal to name what is being done to her. Sometimes they see a society that too often turns away from difficult and necessary truths.
And always this story prompts impassioned conversation, and a writerly recognition of how masterful an author, and wise a human being, Sandra Cisneros is.
Perhaps most importantly, “One Holy Night” reminds those of us who have lived through gender-based violence that we are not alone in our struggle to name things that are painful, and personal, and fundamentally unjust.
So tonight, I not only want to honor Sandra Cisneros and present her with the much-deserved 2025 Harold Washington Literary Award. I also want to thank her, with all of my heart, for a body of work that has made so many of us feel seen, and honored, and less alone.
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