SANDRA CISNEROS PRESENTS: WRITING BETWEEN WORLDS

10:00 am - 11:15 am
| Location of Session: Russell Hill Rogers Tent
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 11:30 AM
| Signing Location: Adult Signing Tent

My Schedule

About the Event

Sandra Cisneros returns to the San Antonio Book Festival with a conversation curated right from her bookshelf. Join Cisneros and authors Stephanie Elizondo Griest (Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life), Daisy Hernández (Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth), AnaLouise Keating (on behalf of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Prieta Is Dreaming: A Cuentos-Novela), and Ann Tashi Slater (Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World) to hear from authors asking important questions, seeking difficult truths, and writing between worlds.

Introduced by:

John Olivares Espinoza

About the Authors

Photo Credit: Alexander Devora

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting writer from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her six books include Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life between the Borderlines; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards. Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she has performed as both a Moth storyteller and as a literary ambassador for the US State Department.

Stephanie joins the Book Festival to discuss her book Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life.

Photo Credit: Diana Solis

Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. Her memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed won Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and was a Publishing Triangle Award finalist. She coedited the classic feminist anthology Colonize This! and is an associate professor of creative writing at Northwestern University.

Her latest book is Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Author

AnaLouise Keating

AnaLouise Keating is a nepantlera, spiritual activist, lifelong student, yoga instructor, and professor at Texas Woman’s University. Keating is the author of many books including The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook and Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. For more than a decade, first in her role as editor of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Interviews/Entrevistas and later as coeditor with Anzaldúa of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation, Keating was mentored by Anzaldúa and gained an intimate understanding of her writing process, her philosophy, and her aesthetics. This working relationship has enabled AnaLouise to carry on Gloria’s legacy, editing and publishing her work: The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (a selection of Anzaldúa’s work, including previously published and unpublished essays, poems, drawings, short stories, and emails); Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Anzaldúa’s transdisciplinary exploration of imagination, creativity, identity, and metaphysics); and, most recently, Prieta Is Dreaming: A Cuentos-Novela (coedited with Kelli D. Zaytoun and Suzanne Bost).

Photo Credit: Barry Sutton

Ann Tashi Slater

Ann Tashi Slater’s essays, fiction, and interviews appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Oprah Daily, Lit Hub, Guernica, Granta, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Tricycle. She speaks and teaches in the US and abroad, including at Princeton University, Columbia University, University of Oxford, Asia Society, the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, and The American University of Paris.

She is the author of Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World, an exploration of how we can find meaning and happiness as we navigate the inevitable transitions that life brings.

Moderator

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist whose work explores the lives of the working class. Her numerous awards include National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, and the Harold Washington Literary Award.

Her novel The House on Mango Street has sold over seven million copies, has been translated into over 25 languages, and is required reading in elementary schools, high schools, and universities across the nation. In 2024, The House on Mango Street was published in the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics Series in recognition of the 40th anniversary of its original publication.

A new collection of poetry, Woman Without Shame, Cisneros’s first in 28 years, was published in 2022 by Knopf and also by Vintage Español in a Spanish language translation by Liliana Valenzuela, Mujer sin vergüenza. Cisneros is at work on a new novel, Infinito, to be published by Knopf in 2027. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico. As a single woman, she chose to have books instead of children. She earns her living by her pen.

Photo Courtesy of Keith Dannemiller