Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954) My Wicked Wicked Ways LINKS Voices From the Gaps: Women Writers of Color http://english.cla.umn.edu/lkd/vfg/Authors/SandraCisneros From Voices From the Gaps, an instructional site from the University of Minnesota focusing on the lives and works of women writers of color, the page on Cisneros includes a brief biography, a useful bibliography, and a list of links to other related sites. Interview with Sandra Cisneros http://latino.sscnet.ucla.edu/women/interviews.html From the Chicana Studies Home Page at UCLA, this interview excerpted from Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (Oxford University Press of Mississippi, 1992) gives an in-depth introduction to the cultural context of Cisneros's writing. BIOGRAPHY Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954) Cisneros, the daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother, grew up in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago, where she attended public schools. The only daughter among seven children, Cisneros recalled that because her brothers attempted to control her and expected her to assume a traditional female role, she grew up feeling as if she had "seven fathers." The family's frequent moves, many of them between the United States and Mexico to visit a grandmother, left Cisneros feeling alone and displaced. She found refuge in reading widely and in writing poems and stories. In the late 1970s, Cisneros's writing talent earned her admission to the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. There, Cisneros observed, "Everyone seemed to have some communal knowledge which I did not have.... My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city's cracks." This realization led Cisneros to focus her writing on the conflicts and yearnings of her own life and culture. Her writings include four volumes of poetry, Bad Boys (1980), The Rodrigo Poems (1985), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), and Loose Woman (1994) and two volumes of fiction, The House on Mango Street (1983) and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). She is also the author of a bilingual children's book, Hairs = Pelitos (1994).