Erika L Sanchez Books in Order

Erika L. Sánchez was born in Chicago and grew up in nearby Cicero, Illinois, in a working-class Mexican American community that shows up again and again in her writing. She is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and much of her work pays close attention to what it feels like to live between languages, expectations, and borders, both real and imagined.

She fell in love with poetry in high school, when writing gave her a way to make sense of loneliness and pressure. She went on to study at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was the first in her family to attend college. After that she spent time in Madrid as a Fulbright scholar, teaching English and leaning harder into poetry, then earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico.

Poetry was the first door.

Her debut collection, Lessons on Expulsion, announced many of the concerns that would carry through the rest of her books. The poems move through immigration, family history, religion, sexuality, shame, violence, and survival. They are rooted in everyday life, but they also reach toward dream, folklore, and the uneasy space between Mexico and the United States. Even in her earliest book, she was already writing with a mix of bluntness, tenderness, and dark humor.

Later in 2017, she published I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, the young adult novel that introduced her to a much bigger audience. Set in Chicago, the book follows Julia after her sister Olga dies, and it uses that loss to explore grief, depression, class, family secrets, and the impossible standards placed on daughters. Readers often respond to how funny and angry Julia can be, and to how honestly the book handles mental health and the tension between family love and family pressure. It also gives Chicago real weight as a setting, not just a backdrop.

Her memoir in essays, Crying in the Bathroom, brings the camera even closer. In it, Sánchez writes about growing up in Chicago in the 1990s, depression, terrible jobs, dating, comedy, abortion, ambition, and the slow work of becoming a writer. The essays are personal, but they also think hard about race, sexism, white feminism, and the cost of trying to be acceptable all the time. The tone can turn on a dime, very funny in one moment, deeply sad in the next, which is part of what makes the book feel so open and alive.

Across genres, she tends to return to a few big subjects: daughters and mothers, migration, class, shame, desire, illness, and the gap between who a person is and who a family or culture expects them to be. Chicago matters a lot in her work. So do Mexico, memory, and the way English and Spanish can sit side by side on the page without asking permission. She has said poetry is her first love, and you can feel that compression and intensity even in her prose.

The recognition followed.

Sánchez has received a Fulbright, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter became a New York Times bestseller, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been adapted for the stage, with a film version in development. Her books have also been translated into several languages.

She has also taught and mentored writers, including a stretch at DePaul University. She lives in Chicago with her family, which feels fitting for a writer whose books keep circling back to the city and the people inside it.