
Speaker Spotlight
October 9-11, 2025
Gracious generous teachers and writers with a passion for community
2025 Keynote Speaker: Sandra Cisneros
DNRS faculty are here to expand your skill set, open new ways of thinking about your work, share their experiences, answer questions, and connect with you as a writer.
Our 2025 keynote speaker is internationally renowned author Sandra Cisneros.
"We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning." —Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, national and international book awards, including the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. More recently, she received the Ford Foundation's Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized with the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In 2022, she was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two nonprofits she founded: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation.
A citizen of both the United States and Mexico, Cisneros currently lives in San Miguel de Allende and makes her living by her pen.
More from Sandra Cisneros