The NEA Big Read program brings communities together by reading the same book. For 2025, RCCA won yet another NEA Big Read grant to host our 12th common book program for Camden, South Jersey, and the Rutgers-Camden campus.
GET INVOLVED!
STARTING NOW at the Paul Robeson Library at Rutgers-Camden
- Pick up your free copy of THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET in English or Spanish
- Enjoy an in-depth display on Sandra Cisneros created by John Powell, Research Librarian
- Take part in our Weave Wall—an interactive community art piece that lets you try your hand at a traditional fiber weaving technique. Up until January 25, 2025.
Spring 2025, RCCA will host Big Read events, all free-of-charge and open to the public. Check back for our schedule of book discussion groups, creative writing circles, exhibitions of K-12 student artwork, and a directed reading performance!
We’re partnering with Camden schools and organizations to run free-of-charge Big Read activities for K-12 students and older adults.
Tune in here to see how THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET touches the lives of kids and seniors in your community!
- Newark, NJ-based poet Dimitri Reyes will lead reading and creative writing workshops with middle and high schools students and older adults in Camden
- Doris Nogueira-Rogers will lead artmaking workshops exploring key themes from the book to middle school students and older adults in Camden– exhibition will be open to the public!
- Collingswood, NJ-based actor and director, Vanessa Crupi will lead a 10-week literary and theater arts class for high school students at LEAP Academy, ending with a Directed Reading Performance in our Black Box Theater on Wednesday, April 16, open to the public!
Book Overview
Told in a series of vignettes stunning for their eloquence, The House on Mango Street is Sandra Cisneros’s greatly admired novel of a Latina girl growing up in Chicago. Acclaimed by critics, beloved by children, their parents and grandparents, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, it has entered the canon of coming-of-age classics.
Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn’t want to belong — not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza’s story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.
About the Author
Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, she is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of the Arts, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. Cisneros is the author of two novels, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo; a collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek; two books of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman; a children’s book, Hairs/Pelitos; a selected anthology of her own work, Vintage Cisneros; with Ester Hernández, Have You Seen Marie?, a fable for adults; A House of My Own, a memoir; and Puro Amor, a bilingual story that she also illustrated. Her most recent book, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo, a story in English and Spanish, will be published in September 2021. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and makes her living by her pen.
“Recognizing Ourselves,” Interview with Sandra Cisneros (American Artscape Magazine, 2016, Issue 1)