Award-Winning Author Sandra Cisneros at BABEL on October 10

Sandra Cisneros, author of “The House on Mango Street,” to Inaugurate New BABEL Season

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The Just Buffalo Literary Center’s BABEL series is proud to host award-winning author Sandra Cisneros in Buffalo on Thursday, October 10, for an engaging conversation at Kleinhans Music Hall. The event starts at 8:00 p.m., with doors opening at 7:00 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at justbuffalo.org.

The event is a component of Just Buffalo’s participation in the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read initiative, which seeks to “deepen our appreciation of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the pleasure of sharing a great book.” Guiding Buffalo in the communal reading of Sandra Cisneros’s renowned novel “The House on Mango Street,” Just Buffalo is partnering with the Hispanic Heritage Council to coordinate a sequence of events themed “Where We Live,” to be celebrated across Western New York during Hispanic Heritage Month.

Sandra Cisneros, an acclaimed poet, short-story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist, delves into the lives of the working-class through her work. Her extensive accolades include NEA fellowships in poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, multiple honorary doctorates, and a host of national and international book awards such as Chicago’s Fifth Star Award, the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. Recently, she was honored with the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship, listed among The Frederick Douglass 200, received the PEN/Nabokov Award for international literature, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. Her classic, coming-of-age novel, The House on Mango Street, has sold over seven million copies, has been translated into over twenty-five languages, and is required reading in elementary, high school, and universities across the nation.
Beyond her writing, Cisneros has nurtured the careers of numerous aspiring and emerging writers via two non-profits she established: the Macondo Foundation, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2020, and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, which operated for fifteen years. Additionally, she organizes Los MacArturos, a group of Latino MacArthur fellows who are community activists. Her literary works are archived at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in Texas.

Tickets, which also include a virtual link for the option to watch from home, are available to the general public for $40; $35 with library card; $10 with student ID. Patron VIP tickets, which include an author reception before the event, are $100.