Lecturer Sandra Cisneros wants to give gift of stories

Sandra Cisneros, Mexican-American author of the award-winning “The House on Mango Street,” will be awarded the Thomas Wolfe Prize and give the accompanying lecture today.

Susan Irons, director of the Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture, helped bring Cisneros to UNC. She said the award goes to writers who have made significant literary contributions and whose work honors the memory of UNC alumnus, author Thomas Wolfe.

“The faculty chose her based upon her body of work and her excellence and her life as a working writer,” Irons said.

Cisneros describes herself as a trespasser of borders. Growing up, she traveled back and forth from Mexico to Chicago with her family. She was influenced by both her father’s urban roots and her mother’s rural roots, and she struggled to maintain her working-class background while fitting into a high-income college environment.

“All of these borders give me vision, and I think this vision makes me able to see things politicians can’t see,” Cisneros said. “We have to think about the places that make us distinct from other writers.”

Cisneros continued to cross borders with her literature, writing essays, novels and poetry. She said emotion has always been a key inspiration in her work.

“What’s autobiographical for me is our emotions — when you look at something and you feel a story, it’s because some place in your heart, you have compassion for that subject,” she said.

Cisneros said her writing explores what it means to be a minority and a woman and to be subsequently left out of history. Though her work has made her somewhat of a cultural icon, Cisneros said she doesn’t like being labeled as such.

“I think of myself as this person distributing blankets in a crisis, but I also think of myself as this person in my workroom weaving blankets on a loom,” she said of her public and private lives.

Cisneros said her lecture will focus on a theme of home — which she hopes will be medicine for audience members, healing and changing them.

“I think I want more than anything for people to take the stories home. They’re gifts,” she said.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest, an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at UNC, said Cisneros’ stories make her a trailblazer.

“She was one of the first Latinas ever published by a mainstream publisher,” Griest said.

As a Latina writer, Griest identifies with Cisneros and cites her as an inspiration.

“It was the first time we’ve seen ourselves and our issues in print,” she said. “She doesn’t only write to make statements; she writes to take action.”

Cisneros said her life gave her a vision for the voiceless.

“We’re all so different,” she said. “The more that we can get that diversity of our voices out there, I think what a gift that is for everyone to see the world in a better focus.”

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