Her novels have won numerous awards including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California in 1986 for Face, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.

[6] Performance pieces were developed in an intense rehearsal process in which actors worked with composers, designers, choreographers, playwrights, and sculptors under her direction.

Productions included her redaction of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Claude van Itallie's The Serpent,[7] After Eurydice,[8] Stoneground, based on Mujica-Lainz' Bomarzo, The Trial, after Franz Kafka, and Threesomes.

[10] The Cecile Pineda Papers, 1959–to the present, include a collection of the author's original correspondence, manuscripts, journals, reviews, videos, drafts, rehearsal logs, and posters documenting her career in both literature and theater.

[citation needed] An avid reader from childhood, Pineda cites Samuel Beckett, Kōbō Abe, J. M. Coetzee, Gabriel García Márquez, and Franz Kafka as writers whose work has most influenced her.

Its protagonist, Ana Magdelena Figeruoa is awarded in a brokered marriage to a celebrated Latin American man of letters who charges her with providing him with three meals a day and a clean change of underwear while he repairs to his aerie to compose the Great Latin American novel of the Boom Years.

Cecile Pineda has enhanced the roster of modern literature's most remarkable female characters with her brilliantly drawn portrait."

Redoubt follows the stream of consciousness of a sentry standing guard in a desert outpost located somewhere close to or distant from an unnamed capital.

Available in all formats at Independent Publishers Group Three Tides[25] (Oct 2016) (ISBN 9780930324926) Available in all formats at Independent Publishers Group Entry Without Inspection A Writer's Life in El Norte[26] (Nov 2020) (ISBN 9780820358468) Available from University of Georgia Press Like Snow Melting in Water (2008) Like Snow Melting in Water is based on a true story.