Sandra Cisneros will receive the CLHOF’s Fuller Award for lifetime achievement
News Category: News and Community News
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Published March 10, 2021
On Saturday, in ceremonies that will take place remotely (of course), writer Sandra Cisneros will be presented with the Fuller Award for her lifetime contribution to literature by the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame (CLHOF), an increasing active force on the cultural scene.
Cisneros is 66 years old and so she has much life still to lead, more words to write. This honor is the latest in a string of accolades that includes a MacArthur Fellowship, Chicago’s Fifth Star Award, the PEN America Literary Award, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature and the National Medal for the Arts.
Donna Seaman, noted author, critic and editor, will interview Cisneros during the event. “I am touched and thrilled to have been asked, not only because of the power of Cisneros’ fiction, poetry, and essays, but also because Cisneros is as captivatingly eloquent in person as on the page. She’s a writer of conscience and compassion, candid, funny, imaginative, and generous, full of surprises and deeply attuned to the human experience,” Seaman wrote in part in an email. “As spring begins to stir in Chicago, I’m looking forward to basking in Sandra’s warmth and light from Mexico.”
Cisneros joins a distinguished group of previous Fuller winners. Her most well-known book is her first novel, “The House on Mango Street,” which has sold something in the lofty neighborhood of 6 million copies since its publication in 1984.
“That novel opened a window to Chicago’s Mexican-American culture and, more widely, to the situation of immigrants in our nation,” says Randy Albers, long a force on the city’s literary landscape, professor and chairman emeritus of fiction at Columbia College, and the president of the CLHOF board. “(Mango Street) will always be considered a Chicago classic and over her long career, Cisneros has written numerous poems, novels, short stories, and essays that have established her as a leading voice for the underserved and underrepresented. She is an activist, feminist, teacher, and mentor, someone to admire and emulate but also to learn from in a time when culture wars have become endemic and division is rampant.”
Cisneros will be in good company, even though you may not know all of the names of previous winners of the Fuller Award, such people as Gene Wolfe, Harry Mark Petrakis, Haki Madhubuti, Rosellen Brown, Angela Jackson (recently named Illinois Poet Laureate), Stuart Dybek, Sara Paretsky, and Sterling Plumpp.
And what about the man for whom the award is named? That would be Henry Blake Fuller, who lived from 1857 to 1929 and was author, editor, poet, critic, and composer, a novelist best known for the 1893 novel “The Cliff-Dwellers.”
The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame was founded in 2008 by the indefatigable Don Evans, writer of the novel “Good Money After Bad,” editor of the anthology “Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year,” and author of the short story collection “An Off-White Christmas.”
Over two years he managed to get a lot of local writers to come up with and finally vote for the people to be inducted — separate from the Fuller Award, the annual hall of fame inductees are all authors who have died. Evans persuaded me to emcee the very first event, held in 2010 on the campus auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University on the Northwest Side. Marc Smith, founder of the poetry slam movement, was the director of the evening.
Before the event began, one person unaware of the history of the CLHOF and hearing the names of its inaugural class (Gwendolyn Brooks, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Lorraine Hansberry and Saul Bellow), asked charmingly,“Gee, who’d they induct last year?”
There was a next year (I emceed that one too, as Theodore Dreiser, Cyrus Colter, Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, Ida B. Wells and Mike Royko joined the hall).
These events and the inductees have always reflected a wonderful diversity of style, race and themes, but all have been tied tightly to Chicago. You can see for yourself the entire ink-stained gang at chicagoliteraryhof.org, where you can see the organization’s many interesting upcoming planned events and register, as you must, for the event Saturday.
The emcee for this year’s event is Chicago poet Carlos Cumpian and there will be some short tributes from local artists and the chance for the audience members to ask questions.
Cisneros, who was born here in 1954, will not be here in her hometown. She’s been hunkered down in her home in San Miguel de Allende, a Mexican city filled with many charms and artists of all types.
As a sign of the increasing importance of the CLHOF, the American Writers Museum, Chicago Public Library and National Museum of Mexican Art are serving as co-presenters and many other organizations have signed on as sponsors. Evans, Seaman and Albers tell me the audience so far is spread across the globe.
“Cisneros’s storytelling opens up the possibility for change,” says Albers. “And her own story, the story of her life, is an example for all of us.”Sandra Cisneros will receive the CLHOF’s Fuller Award for lifetime achievement 7 p.m. March 13 in a Zoom ceremony; free with registration at www.eventbrite.com.
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