Sandra Benitez
Biography
Sandra Benitez
Sandra Benitez has spent her life moving between the Latin American culture of her Puerto Rican mother and the Anglo-American culture of her father. She was born March 26, 1941 in Washington D.C., one of a pair of identical twins. Her sister, Susana, died just 37 days after their birth. A year later, her father, who worked for the U.S. State Department, was assigned to Mexico, where her sister, Anita, was born. Not long after, the family transferred with him to El Salvador and this is where Sandra lived for most of the next 20 years. In Latin America, she learned that life is frail and capricious; that people can find joy in the midst of insurmountable obstacles; that, in the end, it is hope that sustains.
When Benitez reached high school age, her parents, in part to “Americanize” her, sent Sandra to her paternal grandparents’ modest dairy farm in northeastern Missouri. She attended Unionville high school, returning each summer to El Salvador. In Missouri, she saw the back-breaking work and quiet self-reliance required to extract a living from the land and its animals. She learned that life is what you make it; that satisfaction comes from a job well done; that, in the end, it is steadfastness that leads to goals accomplished and dreams realized.
Benitez returned to Missouri for her college years, eventually earning a master’s degree in literature from what is, today, Truman University in Kirksville. Later, she taught literature at both the high school and university level. Later, she did a four-year stint in the international division of a major training corporation and traveled extensively throughout Latin America.
In 1980 she began to write fiction. It was not until 13 years later that her first book, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, set in Mexico, was published. It won wonderful reviews and a number of prizes including the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the Minnesota Book Award, and selection as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’ First Fiction Award. Her second book, Bitter Grounds, set in El Salvador, won an American Book award and a nomination for Great Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize. Both books, and her third as well, have been published in more than half a dozen languages.
Sandra’s third novel, The Weight of All Things, also set in El Salvador, tells the heart-breaking story of a nine-year-old boy caught up in a vicious civil war. While it won no awards, it garnered plenty of praise from reviewers. Her latest novel, Night of the Radishes draws on her unique bi-cultural background. In it, a Minnesota woman, plunged into depression by a series of family tragedies, finds a long-lost brother and redemption in the mystical atmosphere of Oaxaca, Mexico. Published by Hyperion Books, it is due for release in January, 2004.
Benitez’s work has also appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. Most notably, A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember, Mickey Pearlman, editor, St. Martin’s Press, and Sleeping with One Eye Open, Marilyn Kallet, editor, University of Georgia Press.
Sandra’s work has earned her nearly two dozen honors, awards and grants (see below), and she is much in demand as a teacher and speaker. In 1997 she was selected as the University of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Writer in Residence. In 1998 she did the Writers Community Residency for the YMCA National Writer’s Voice program. In the spring of 2001 she held the Knapp Chair in Humanities as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of San Diego. Other teaching residencies include Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Flight of the Mind, the University of Minnesota Split Rock Arts Program, and Hamline (Minn.) University.
Sandra is the recipient of the 2004 National Hispanic Heritage Award Honoree for Literature.
In December, 2006, Benitez received one of the first United States Artists Awards, being named a USA Gund Fellow.
2006 Central Region Winner. ConvaTec and Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America GREAT COMEBACKS AWARD.
2006: "Rockford Reads One Book," Rockford, IL
A Place Where the Sea Remembers and Alli Donde El Mar Recuerda
all-city book read selection.
Benitez has lectured at colleges, high schools and professional organizations coast to coast. All of her first three novels, but especially A Place Where the Sea Remembers, are used extensively in classrooms through the country and are book group favorites as well.
Benitez lives with her husband, Jim Kondrick, in Edina, Minnesota, and has completed her first non-fiction Bag Lady: A Memoir of Illness and Recovery. The book is an account of Sandra's 30 year struggle with Ulcerative Colitis, and her acceptance of the ileostomy surgery that changed her life.
Sandra Benitez is the 2004 National Hispanic Heritage Foundation Honoree for Literature, as well as listed by Hispanic Business Magazine as one of the U.S.'s 100 Influentials.
Sandra Benitez
