"And I'm not even dead!"

That was how the poet and novelist Sandra Cisneros reacted to thunderous applause Sept. 13 from a packed audience in Cornell's Rockefeller Hall. A tiny woman of 52 whose voice rings like that of an enthusiastic teenager, Cisneros visited Cornell as part of the Creative Writing Reading Series.

Department of English chair Molly Hite said Cisneros is the writer most requested by Cornell students and faculty.

"Both a poet and a fiction writer and someone who often weaves the two modes until they fuse, Cisneros opens up extraordinary possibilities in the woven and sometimes nearly fused languages, English and Spanish," Hite said. "She's a literary risk-taker, a violator who's also, and best of all, a creator. Who makes wonderful people out of language and clothes them in atmospheres, neighborhoods [and] dream lives."

Cisneros said her writing straddles genres: "They're always these amphibians." She is author of the novel "The House on Mango Street," which sold 2 million copies, and poetry collections, including "Loose Women" and "My Wicked Wicked Ways." The winner of a MacArthur fellowship in 1995, Cisneros draws on her Mexican-American heritage and childhood in Chicago.

Now living in San Antonio, Texas, where she founded a writers' workshop that emphasizes community service, Cisneros opened the reading by urging her audience to work for peace. She came to Ithaca directly from a retreat for Buddhist people of color, she said, a "Buddhist boot camp" with the Zen monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. She suggested writing to first lady Laura Bush, as she has done, to protest the war in Iraq, and making peace with everyone in our lives.

"We all have our personal terrorists who make our twin towers shake when we see them," Cisneros said. "I'm embarrassed and ashamed that I still have some left."

"How do I become Gandhi in 12 easy steps?" she read from an essay. "How does anyone living in the United States today ... with the world on fire, imagine they can make a difference towards making a more peaceful planet?"

The Creative Writing Reading Series is sponsored by two anonymous Cornell alumni.