Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, the only daughter among seven children of a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother. The family moved often, between Chicago and Mexico City and from one Chicago apartment to another, and she grew up shy and bookish, an outsider in her own family of brothers and at school.

She went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to study poetry, and there she had the experience that made her a writer. In a seminar, her classmates were discussing the idea of the house in literature, and remembering the attics and family homes of their childhoods. Cisneros realized she had nothing like that to describe. She had grown up in cramped apartments in poor neighborhoods. At first she felt ashamed. Then she understood that her own experience was the subject nobody else in the room could write.

The result was The House on Mango Street (1984). It is told in short, poetic chapters, some only a paragraph long, by Esperanza Cordero, a girl growing up in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago. She describes her family, her neighbors, the women she sees trapped at windows, and her longing for a house of her own and a life beyond Mango Street. Its language is simple enough for a young reader and layered enough for any adult. It has sold millions of copies and is taught in schools across the country.

Cisneros went on to write Woman Hollering Creek (1991), a collection of stories set along the Texas–Mexico border, and Caramelo (2002), a big, joyful novel about a family’s road trips between Chicago and Mexico City. She has also written poetry and a memoir, A House of My Own. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995 and the National Medal of Arts in 2015.

She has spoken often about writing in the space between two languages and two countries, and about finding her voice by writing in the way that she and her neighbors actually spoke, instead of the way she thought literature was supposed to sound.