Venue

: The Great Hall
: 1119 Eighth Avenue (enter on Eighth Avenue)
Seattle, 98101 United States + Google Map

Organizer

: Seattle Arts & Lectures
Email: grajendran@lectures.org
: View Organizer Website

Note: A livestream for this event will be available.

Live Captioning will be available for this event.

Presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures. For questions about this event, please contact grajendran@lectures.org or call (206) 621-2230.

Rentals

Acclaimed by critics and beloved by readers of all ages, Sandra Cisneros is a writer, performer, and artist who is celebrating the 40th anniversary of The House on Mango Street, the essential coming-of-age novel about Esperanza Cordero and her Chicago barrio, and one of the most cherished contemporary novels. Forty years after its publication, Sandra Cisneros remains a force in the literary community.

Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting.” Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time.

Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. Acclaimed by critics, a staple in schools, translated into dozens of languages, this gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you’re from.

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, national and international book awards, including the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. More recently, she received the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized with the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In addition to her writing, Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two nonprofits she founded: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. As a single woman, she made the choice to have books instead of children. A citizen of both the United States and Mexico, Cisneros currently lives in San Miguel de Allende and makes her living by her pen.