Sandra Cisneros

Cisneros grew up in Chicago, the only daughter among seven children of a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, moving frequently between Chicago and Mexico City. At the Iowa Writers' Workshop she felt like an outsider among classmates writing about houses with staircases and rooms of their own, and the friction produced the compressed, vernacular voice of The House on Mango Street, published in 1984.

That book, part memoir and part fiction, became a staple of American classrooms and sold millions of copies while its author lived modestly, teaching and running writing workshops for Latina youth. She later settled in San Antonio, Texas, where she painted her house a shade of purple that drew objections from a historic-district review board, a fight she won.

A MacArthur Fellow, she has continued to write across genres while remaining closely tied to the Chicana feminist and working-class communities her first book made visible.