1. Cisneros won the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (often called the “genius award” and worth thousands of dollars) in 1995.
2. Cisneros has been married twice and has 9 children.
3. Cisneros painted her home in San Antonio fluorescent pink.
4. For two years, the San Antonio city council objected to the color (purple) that Cisneros painted her house. She didn’t care.
5. Her most recognized work of fiction, House on Mango Street has sold over two million copies and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Most middle schools, high schools, and colleges use the book as required reading.
6. Cisneros lives with six dogs, four cats, and a parrot called Augustina.
7. Cisneros discovered her otherness when she was in elementary school.
8. When asked what makes a story good, Cisneros has answered that stories should make you laugh or cry. And if it is really good, she says, the story should make you do both.
9. Sandra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954 in a poor neighborhood of Chicago, populated mainly by Hispanic immigrants and hyphenated Americans.
10. Cisneros's parents were firm believers in education, knowing that it was the only way their children could break the bonds of poverty.
11. "In retrospect, I'm lucky my father believed daughters were meant for husbands. It meant it didn't matter if I majored in something silly like English," Cisneros told Glamour.
12. In an effort to fit in, she mimicked the writing of famous male authors, her professors, and even fellow students. Cisneros finally found her place during a class discussion of the home as a metaphor for writing. As her well-bred classmates talked of long hallways and homey kitchens, she realized that she had no such home in her memory. It was this realization that finally let Cisneros break free. "It was not until this moment when I separated myself, when I considered myself truly distinct, that my writing acquired a voice....
