µPAR@ ` NTEXT ` @Cisneros, Sandra1954╨ poet and short story writer Born in Chicago on December 20, 1954, Sandra Cisneros was the only daughter of a Mexican father and a Chicana mother. She grew up in poverty, and her family moved often and traveled regularly to Mexico City for visits to her paternal grandmother. The only girl among six brothers, she was a shy, introverted child who spent her time reading and observing her surroundings in the many poor neighborhoods where she lived. She came to love books╤she had a library card even before she could read╤and while she spoke Spanish at home, she always read and wrote in English. At Loyola University she received a B.A. in English in 1976. In the late 1970s she enrolled in the Iowa Writers╒ Workshop and wrote poetry. There she began to identify herself as a Chicana writer╤╙a yellow weed among the city╒s cracks╙╤and her writing took on a distinctive voice. Her first work of fiction, The House on Mango Street, was a series of 44 interwoven tales narrated by a young girl in a Chicago ghetto; published by a small press in 1984, it won the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1985. Cisneros received her M.A. from the University of Iowa, later teaching for two years at Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago. During this time she received local celebrity when one of her poems was selected to be posted in Chicago buses. In 1986 she received a Dobie-Paisano fellowship and relocated to Texas, where she finished My Wicked, Wicked Ways, 1987, her first book of poetry. Until she received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, she was unable to make a living from her writing; for a while she passed out fliers in supermarkets and laundromats trying to recruit students for a writing workshop. She eventually made contact with Susan Bergholtz, a literary agent who had been trying to track down Cisneros for over three years; Bergholtz got her a contract with Random House, making her the first Chicana to receive a major publishing contract. In 1991 she published Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, short stories about Chicanas on both sides of the Texan-Mexican border. When Random House took over the publication of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros immediately began to receive national attention. Loose Woman, a collection of poems, was published in 1994. vstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ; !I π 5¬ Σ !I ░ !I ╔ !I v 5¬ w !I ╥ !I Φ !I !I 4 !I ¡ !I ╞ !I !I !I link `
