Erika L. Sánchez is a highly accomplished author, poet, and essayist. She is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and has used her experiences growing up in a Mexican working-class town in Illinois as inspiration for her writing. Sánchez's debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in 2017 and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in the same year by Knopf Books for Young Readers, became a New York Times Bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist.
Sánchez's writing is informed by her experiences growing up as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and her determination to defy borders of all kinds. She has been recognized for her work with numerous awards, including a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She has also been appointed as the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University and is part of the inaugural core faculty of the Randolph College Low Residency MFA Program.
In addition to her poetry and young adult novels, Sánchez has also written nonfiction pieces for various publications, including Al Jazeera, Cosmopolitan, ESPN.com, the Guardian, NBC News, Rolling Stone, and Salon. She has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain, and has been a Princeton Arts Fellow from 2017-2019. Her work often explores themes of identity, culture, and belonging, and she continues to be a prominent and influential voice in contemporary literature.