Sandra Cisneros & Manuel Muñoz: A Conversation

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two previous collections and a novel. He has received a Whiting Award and three O. Henry Awards and has appeared in Best American Short Stories. The stories in The Consequences (Graywolf Press) are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns surrounding Fresno. In them, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables and are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by “la migra” – their quotidian struggles, and the immense challenges faced by their families. The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his characters – straight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and old – are tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve husbands who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequently, perhaps literally, haunted. In The Consequences, obligations can shape, support, and sometimes derail us.

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and artist. She is the author of Bad Boys, My Wicked Wicked Ways, Loose Woman, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, The House on Mango Street, Caramelo, Have You Seen Marie?, and Bravo, Bruno. Her most recent books are A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, illustrated with photographs, and Puro Amor, in a dual-language edition translated by Liliana Valenzuela and featuring illustrations by the author. She is a citizen of both the United States and Mexico. Woman Without Shame: Poems (Knopf) is Cisneros’ first book of poetry in 28 years. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, the collection includes songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home – in the Mexico of her ancestors and her own heart.