Erika L. Sánchez was born in 1984 in Cicero, Illinois to undocumented Mexican immigrants. Sánchez was raised in a predominantly Mexican-American working-class community, and she is bilingual in Spanish and English. Sánchez attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, then went on to teach English and study poetry in Madrid through the Fulbright program. After that, she earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of New Mexico.
Sánchez's writing often draws inspiration from her experience as a first-generation, Mexican-American woman. She is a poet, novelist, and essayist. In 2015, Sánchez received the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
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