Born and raised in Chicago, Chicana writer and poet Sandra Cisneros is best known for The House on Mango Street (1983), a series of interconnected prose poems. She is one of a handful of Latina writers to make it big in the American literary scene and the first Chicana to sign with a large publishing firm. Cisneros graduated from Loyola University in Chicago and went on to the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa where she earned an MFA. Her poetry collections include My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987) and Loose Woman (1994). She also has authored a collection of essays and short stories, Woman Hollering Creek (1991). Her poems and stories offer a conversational style, chatty and rambling. Her writing is lean and crisp, peppered with Spanish words.

Further Reading:

Doyle, Jacqueline. "More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. " The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter 1995, 5-35.

Kanoza, Theresa. "Esperanza's Mango Street: Home for Keeps."Notes on Contemporary Literature. Vol. 25, No. 3, May 1995, 9.