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Author

Sandra Cisneros, a Mexican-American author, is the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children. She was born in 1954 in Chicago. Throughout Cisneros's childhood she would move between Mexico City and Chicago, never allowing her much time to get settled in any place. Her loneliness from not having sisters or friends drove her to bury herself in books.^[2]

In high school she wrote poetry and was the literary magazine editor, but, according to Cisneros, she did not really start writing until her first creative writing class in college in 1974. After that it took a while to find her own voice. She explains, "I rejected what was at hand and emulated the voices of the poets I admired in books: big male voices like James Wright and Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke, all wrong for me."^[3]

Cisneros then realized that she needed to write what she knew, and adopted a writing style that was purposely opposite that of her classmates. Five years after receiving her MA from the writing program at the University of Iowa, she returned to Loyola University Chicago, where she had previously earned a BA in English, to work as an administrative assistant. Prior to this job, she worked in the Chicano barrio in Chicago teaching to high school dropouts at Latino Youth Alternative High School. Through these jobs, she gained more experience with the problems of young Latin Americans.^[4]

Among her honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. She has taught at many colleges and universities, including the University of California, University of Michigan, and the University of New Mexico. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.^[5]