| The writer discusses her revealing new book of poetry, “Woman Without Shame,” her peripatetic life, and that infamous blurb for “American Dirt.”  Photograph by Luvia Lazo for The New Yorker “The House on Mango Street,” Sandra Cisneros’s semi-autobiographical first novel, published in 1984, has become a canonical work of modern Chicano literature—and required reading at schools across the country. The sixty-seven-year-old Cisneros has written many other stories, essays, and novels since then, and her most recent book, “Woman Without Shame,” which was released last week, is her first poetry collection in twenty-eight years. Yxta Maya Murray speaks with the author in a lively series of interviews conducted in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Cisneros now lives, about studying at Iowa’s poetry program, finding home, and seeking honesty in sex and love. - On writing poems: “If I didn’t have poetry, I would have to be on Xanax or Prozac. It’s my medicine.”
- On a women’s writing workshop held with a fellow-novelist: “We call our workshop the panocha—vagina—workshop. We need to write from that place as women.”
- On her controversial blurb for Jeanine Cummins’s novel “American Dirt”: “I knew she did her homework, and she wrote a thriller,” Cisneros says. “I know what I am, I know what I do, and so I don’t have any problem.”
—Jessie Li, newsletter editor | 
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