Thank you.
Bienvenidos, y buenas tardes.
It's always hard in August--
I mean in autumn.
Is it buenas tardes o buenas noches, I can't tell.
Can I take you back to a moment in childhood
recognizable to some, but maybe not all,
when your whole family is gathered around
to watch you do something.
Maybe sing a song, like Celia does in the novel Jaramillo.
Or take a turn at bat in a family game of softball.
Or play with the new toy that your older siblings
want to get a crack at first, even though it's yours.
And you fail.
Don't do so well.
And the tío in the back lets out a sound.
[VOCALIZING]
But you give it, as Sandra likes to say, el try, to fail better.
Va a salir bonito.
But it doesn't work.
And this time, it's a tía who you can hear, [VOCALIZING].
And then, finally, this time con ganas,
you'd get to try it one more time, and still nothing.
Ni modo.
This time, you hear actual words.
Oh, qué la.
That's how it was for me trying to write this introduction.
What to say about someone like Sandra
that hasn't been said already.
I could give you the list of accolades
because you should know that she's a MacArturo.
The recipient of a MacArthur Genius grant.
And you should know that she used the MacArthur to help
establish the Macondo Writers Workshop, a haven for writers
in our community for almost 25 years now.
I could tell you about the House On Mango Street.
And how many middle school and high school
students across the country have read it.
How many writers lives it has inspired, how many poets,
how many visual artists, how many dancers, how
many teachers, how many parents, grateful
to have a book in their hands that
brings reading and experience across the generations.
I could tell you about A House of My Own:
Stories From My Life.
The intimate book of essays that starts
to answer the question many often ask of Sandra--
how did you do it.
How did you make a poet's life?
How did you find a house of your own?
And the answers take you to Mexico, to Provincetown,
to San Antonio, to Greece.
And crucially, they remember and honor other writers.
The poet, Luis Omar Salinas.
The magnificent Gwendolyn Brooks.
My favorita, que descansen en paz.
I could tell you about Carmelo, the dazzling novel
of memory and family.
The intimacy and intricacy of storytelling,
and the directions it might take you if you decide to put
your own cuento to paper.
You were the author of the telenovela of your life,
all right, the book says.
Comedy or tragedy, choose.
Or I could simply take delight in Sandra's style.
Her poetic elevation of the humble simile,
which is really the elevation of our very
Mexican way of talking.
Exagerado, and believable,
only because she invites our imaginations to do
the comparisons.
My favorite line from The House On Mango Street.
"Love is like a big black piano being pushed off
the top of a three story building,
and you're on the bottom waiting to catch it.
Or this blurb about the poet, Richard Blanco, sad, tender,
and filled with longing.
Like an old photograph, a saint's statue,
worn by the devout.
A bolero on a radio on a night full of rain.
Me emocionan.
There's no other way to say it.
They emotion me.
Or for fiction writer, Denise Chavez,
I love this book so much, it sounds like I'm lying.
Those of us, those of us who know Spanish,
and who have sometimes have had it corrected all our lives,
can hear the deliberate word-for-word translation.
But it's asserted now as our music, our mistake in speech.
It's pure poetry.
Everywhere in Sandra's books, you will see the push
and pull of family.
How we talk to each other, how we learn to listen to that
poetry, ' to transform what others want us to be ashamed
about into the glory of what it means to come together.
It is at the heart of Sandra's presence in this world
as a writer, the forming of community,
the reaching out to others to invite them in, to share
in reading, in creating, or simply listening to one another's
cuentos.
We consider her a great friend to the Tucson community,
and I want to thank her one more time for the visit
seven years ago, when she came alongside my mentor, Helena
Maria Viramontes Montez, to observe the American Library
Association's 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week.
And she used that occasion to protest HB
22 81, which had banned--
which had banned Mexican-American studies
at Tucson High School, right across the street.
Without fail, without hesitation,
she can tell you that access to books,
that a chance to listen and tell your own poems
can change your life.
It certainly changed mine way back in 1988.
As a 16-year-old, when a grad student named Francis,
who I have never been able to track down even in this age
of social media--
gave me a writing prompt that was really
a mirror to my own life.
Six years later on May 2, 1994 at the Cambridge Public
library, I stood in line to meet one of my literary idols,
and my college friend Paul Martin blurted out for me,
"he wants to be a writer."
And Sandra wrote in this book, Dale gas.
And those words have carried me all the way here,
25 years later, with the honor of introducing her to you,
and to say con mil gracias, gracias y más y más y todavía más. Sandra Cisneros.