Erika L. Sánchez

About Erika L. Sánchez

Erika L. Sánchez was born around 1984 in Cicero, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago, to immigrant parents from Los Ojos, Chihuahua, Mexico. She grew up bilingual and attended Morton East High School in Cicero. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a master of fine arts degree from the University of New Mexico. Her parents' journey to the United States—crossing the border undocumented—and her experience navigating two cultures simultaneously are central to her artistic identity and to the themes that run throughout her work.

Sánchez published her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, in 2017. That same year she published her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, the story of Julia, a second-generation Mexican-American teenager in Chicago who lives in the shadow of her late sister and struggles against the expectations placed on daughters in her family and community. The book became a New York Times bestseller, won the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. In 2022, she published her memoir, Crying in the Bathroom. She was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University from 2017 to 2019 and served as writer-in-residence at DePaul University from 2020 to 2023. In 2015 she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, one of the most prestigious prizes in American poetry. A film adaptation of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter was announced with actress America Ferrera attached to direct for Amazon MGM and Orion Pictures.

Her Most Challenged Work

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter has been challenged in school libraries and classrooms for sexual content, explicit language, and depictions of mental health crises and suicidal ideation. Sánchez has responded publicly to the banning of her work, stating that the reasoning behind challenges is rooted in misogyny and racism—that books depicting the lives of young women of color are uniquely targeted in ways that comparable books about white characters are not. She argues that the very experiences described in the novel—depression, sexual awakening, cultural conflict, the pressure of immigrant family expectations—are precisely what many of her readers are living, and that erasing those stories from school shelves sends a harmful message about whose lives are worth representing.

Recognition

In addition to the Tomás Rivera Award and her National Book Award nomination, Sánchez has received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and was honored at Princeton University and DePaul University. She has been widely profiled as one of the most significant new voices in both contemporary American poetry and Latinx young adult fiction.