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The House on Mango Street

Told in a series of vignettes stunning for their eloquence, The House on Mango Street is Sandra Cisneros’s greatly admired novel of a Latina girl growing up in Chicago. Acclaimed by critics, beloved by children, their parents and grandparents, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, it has entered the canon of coming-of-age classics.

Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong—not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza’s story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.

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The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Like the protagonist of this 2007 debut novel, MacArthur Foundation Fellow Dinaw Mengestu came to the United States from Ethiopia, fleeing with his family after the Communist Revolution in 1974, which took the life of his uncle. Called “a great African novel, a great Washington novel, and a great American novel” (the New York Times Book Review), The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears alternates between the present and the past to tell the story of a lonely Ethiopian shopkeeper in a D.C. neighborhood undergoing gentrification. “Almost every page reminds us that ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’ are deceptively decisive words” (the New York Times). Mengestu “belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and international, if sometimes forced, migrations,” writes the Los Angeles Times. His “assured prose and haunting set pieces … are heartrending and indelible” (Publishers Weekly).

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Dreamers

Dreamers is a celebration of making your home with the things you always carry: your resilience, your dreams, your hopes and history. It’s the story of finding your way in a new place, of navigating an unfamiliar world and finding the best parts of it. In dark times, it’s a promise that you can make better tomorrows. 

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Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, which has been translated into more than 25 languages, she is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of the Arts, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. Cisneros is the author of two novels, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo; the collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek; two books of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman; a children’s book, Hairs/Pelitos; a selected anthology of her own work, Vintage Cisneros; with Ester Hernández, Have You Seen Marie?, a fable for adults; A House of My Own, a memoir; and Puro Amor, a bilingual story that she also illustrated. Her most recent book, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo, a story in English and Spanish, was published in September 2021. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and makes her living by her pen.

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Dinaw Mengestu

“Some children dream of being in a band,” Mengestu has said, “I had my dream of being on a list.” In 2010 his dream came true as he made The New Yorker's “20 under 40” list of fiction writers to watch. Mengestu was born in 1978 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and didn't return there until 2006. He left with his mother and sister for the United States when he was two years old—reuniting with his father who fled during the communist revolution.

Mengestu primarily grew up in the Midwest—in Peoria and Oak Park, Illinois, where he experienced the “indelible mark” of racism, marginalization, and outsider status. “Not African American or Black enough for some” but called a “n— to his face” by white students, Mengestu experienced isolation and bigotry. Books became a way to escape and make sense of the world he lived in. Reading On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, he recalls learning that he “could be very happy completely alone for a long period of time if I had enough books with me.”

Always knowing he wanted to write, even though he told his parents he was going “to be a doctor then a lawyer,” Mengestu worked on The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears for close to four years, as he moved from job to job. The novel won him many accolades, chief among them a fellowship at the Lannan Foundation, the New Yorker’s list of “20 under 40,” the National Book Award’s 5 under 35 award, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship in 2012. He followed the success of his first novel, now translated into more than a dozen languages, with two other award-winning novels: How to Read the Air (2010) and All Our Names (2014). In addition to these three novels, Mengestu has written widely about recent geopolitical upheaval on the African continent—most notably on the violence in Darfur for Rolling Stone. Like Saul Bellow and James Baldwin, Mengestu avidly self-identifies solely as an American writer, refusing to add adjectives such as “immigrant,” “African,” or “African American” to qualify his experience or works.

Mengestu serves as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities at Bard College and is the director of the Written Arts Program.

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Yuyi Morales

Born in Mexico and raised among giant grandmothers, mossy house walls, and rampaging feral gardens, Yuyi Morales fostered a strong bond with the magical stories that ran in her family. Since having immigrated to the US in 1994, she has drawn from her family’s legacy and her heritage to create some of the most celebrated Latino works for children’s books.

Yuyi is the 2004 winner of the Pura Belpre Medal for Illustration for her book Just a Minute: A Trickster Tale and Counting Book, as well as the 2008 winner for Los Gatos Black on Halloween (written by Marissa Montes), given to a Latino illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.

Her book Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez (written by Kathell Krull) was the recipient of the Christopher Award and the Jane Adams Award, and was deemed one of the best books of 2003 by Child magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and School Library Journal.

Yuyi is also the creator of ALA notable book, Little Night, co-released in Spanish as Nochecita, and winner of the 2008 SCBWI Golden Kite Medal.
Some of other recognitions her work has received include the Americas Award, the California Book Award, and the Tomas Rivera Award, won in 2004 and 2008.

Asked about her work, Yuyi says, “I strive to capture the incredible beauty of the everyday forms using textures and colors as another way to reveal the heart of the story. I also pursue glow and luminosity with resolve. If I could ask for a talent, it would be to become a color genius.”