Erika L. Sánchez

Erika L. Sánchez earned an MFA from the University of New Mexico. She is the author of the memoir Crying in the Bathroom (Viking, 2022); the poetry collection Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf Press, 2017); and the YA novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2017), which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. 

Sánchez and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a CantoMundo Fellowship, the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize, the 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and an awardee of the 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

From 2017 to 2019, Sánchez was a Princeton Arts Fellow, and from 2019 to 2023 she was the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz chair at DePaul University. Sánchez lives in Chicago.