Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 20, 1954, the only daughter in a family of seven children. Her mother, Elvira Cordero Anguiano, was a self-educated Mexican American who kindled her children’s enthusiasm for reading by taking them to libraries. Her father, Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral, was a Mexican upholsterer who regularly moved the family between Chicago and Mexico City.

In Chicago Catholic schools, where expectations for Mexican American girls were low, Cisneros was a below-average student, but she read voraciously and began writing early. After graduating from Loyola University in Chicago in 1976, she earned a master’s degree at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she learned “what I didn’t want to be, how I didn’t want to write.”

Upon returning from graduate study to Chicago, she awakened to what she called the “incredible deluge of voices” that has become the hallmark of her writing. Her stories and poems reveal a variety of voices, Mexican American voices mainly, telling their stories in an exuberant mixture of English and Spanish.

Her writing career started slowly. She earned her living as a teacher, college recruiter, arts administrator, writing teacher, and lecturer. Her choice to remain poor in order to write puzzled her father and brothers and often caused her to wonder whether she was betraying her beloved Mexican American culture by choosing a nontraditional life. She wrestled with the problems of how to be a liberated woman and remain a Latina.

Cisneros’s fiction and poetry are widely anthologized, and The House on Mango Street is frequently taught in schools and colleges. Random House issued a one-volume selection from her fiction and poetry, Vintage Cisneros, in 2004. She has won a number of honors, including two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships for fiction and poetry (1988, 1982), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1995), and a Texas Medal of the Arts (2003). She has received several grants and guest lectureships, and honorary degrees from Loyola University, Chicago (2002), and the State University of New York at Purchase (1993). Caramelo (2002) was named a notable book of the year in several newspapers, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune.

Cisneros has a Web site with biographical information and images and links to reviews and interviews. In June, 2003, Cisneros wrote at her Web site, “I currently earn my living by my pen. I live in San Antonio, Texas, in a violet house filled with many creatures, little and large.” In interviews, she reports that in San Antonio she found a rich source of voices for her stories and poems as well as an increasing independence that confirmed her in the choice of a nontraditional life, which she described as being “no one’s mother and nobody’s wife.” Cisneros has come to see a main purpose of her writing as helping people to see their lives more clearly. This help often takes the form of showing that “we can be Latino and still be American.”