Church bells are ringing as I write this. Some sound like church bells, and some sound like a tin cup banged across prison bars, and some like an angry mother clanging un comal. I have winnowed these poems from three decades, two countries, and too many houses. In seventeen days I will be sixty-seven. It is time I let them go.

3rd December 2021

Casa Coatlicue

San Miguel de Allende

Guanajuato, México

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, she is the recipient of numerous awards, including NEA Fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Texas Medal of the Arts, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. She has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two nonprofits she founded: Macondo Writers, celebrating its twenty-seventh anniversary in 2022, and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, which operated for fifteen years. As a single woman, Cisneros made the choice to have books instead of children. Her literary papers are preserved at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. Currently she lives in San Miguel de Allende. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and earns her living by her pen.

What’s next on
your reading list?

Discover your next
great read!

Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

Sign up now.

_141032870_