Erika Sánchez

Sánchez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, is from Cicero, Illinois.[1] She has two brothers.[1] She attended Morton East High School,[1] then the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude.[2] After college she traveled to Madrid, Spain to teach English with the Fulbright program and pursued poetry.[2] She then earned an MFA in poetry from the University of New Mexico.[3]

Sánchez won a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship in 2015.[4]

Her first poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion,[5] was published by Graywolf in July 2017.[6] The Washington Post named it to a list of best poetry of July 2017, calling it a "fierce, assertive debut".[7] In The New York Times, Kathleen Rooney praised Sánchez's "wrenching explorations of guilt and shame, grief and misogyny...Her depictions of misery hurt and haunt," particularly through her use of the second person "to draw readers close to difficult subjects."[8] In 2017, United States poet laureate Tracy K. Smith recommended Sánchez as among the best new voices in poetry.[9]

Sánchez's first young adult novel was I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.[10][11][12] Bustle named it to a list of the best 15 young adult books appearing in October 2017[13] and it was a finalist for the National Book Award for young people's literature.[14]. It also won the 2018 Tomás Rivera Award.[15]

From 2017 to 2019, Sánchez was an arts fellow at Princeton University, teaching poetry and fiction writing.[2]

Sánchez lives in Chicago.[16]

• Official site