Erika L. Sánchez is a novelist, poet, feminist, and cheerleader for young women everywhere. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Young Adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Knopf, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the acclaimed debut poetry collection, Lessons in Expulsion (Graywolf Press, 2017), which the Washington Post called “a fierce, assertive debut.”

The daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Sánchez grew up in the working-class town of Cicero, IL. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from the University of Illinois at Chicago, then went onto Madrid, Spain on a Fulbright Scholarship. After her scholarship, she moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where she received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Chicago.