Susan Irons, director of the Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture, helped bring Cisneros to UNC. She said the award goes to writers who have made significant literary contributions and whose work honors the memory of UNC alumnus, author Thomas Wolfe.
“The faculty chose her based upon her body of work and her excellence and her life as a working writer,” Irons said.
Cisneros describes herself as a trespasser of borders. Growing up, she traveled back and forth from Mexico to Chicago with her family. She was influenced by both her father’s urban roots and her mother’s rural roots, and she struggled to maintain her working-class background while fitting into a high-income college environment.
“All of these borders give me vision, and I think this vision makes me able to see things politicians can’t see,” Cisneros said. “We have to think about the places that make us distinct from other writers.”
Cisneros continued to cross borders with her literature, writing essays, novels and poetry. She said emotion has always been a key inspiration in her work.
“What’s autobiographical for me is our emotions — when you look at something and you feel a story, it’s because some place in your heart, you have compassion for that subject,” she said.
