Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. A poet, essayist and fiction writer, she is the author of a young adult novel, I AM NOT YOUR PERFECT MEXICAN DAUGHTER (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2017), a National Book Award Finalist and the poetry collection, LESSONS ON EXPULSION (Graywolf, 2017), a finalist of the Pen America Open Book Award. Her nonfiction has been published in Al Jazeera, Cosmopolitan, ESPN.com, the Guardian, NBC News, Rolling Stone, Salon and elsewhere. She has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow

Books by Erika L. Sánchez

Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir

by Erika L. Sánchez - Autobiography, Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction

Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the '90s, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit and disappointment --- a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit and singular powers of perception about the world around her. In these essays, Sánchez writes about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression, revealing an interior life rich with ideas, self-awareness and perception.