Most of Cisneros' classmates at Iowa were people from more materially privileged backgrounds than Cisneros', descendents of European immigrants to the U.S. Initially, Cisneros attempted to use their kinds of subjects, characters, and settings in her own writing. Unhappy with the results, she then made an important decision: She decided to "rebel" by writing about the neighborhoods in which she had grown up, the people who were her relatives and friends and neighbors. The House on Mango Street was begun.
Cisneros did not complete the book for several years, however; meanwhile, she taught high school and served as a college recruiter and minority student counselor. In 1982–83, after winning a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Cisneros went to Greece to work on her fiction. After serving as artist-in-residence at Foundation Michael Karolyi in Vence, France, she returned to the U.S. and, in 1984, found a publisher for Mango Street: The University of Houston's Arte Público Press. During the following few years, Cisneros held a variety of university positions, always continuing to write both poetry and prose. With the Random House publication in 1991 of "Woman Hollering Creek" and Other Stories and the reissuing in the same year of The House on Mango Street, the writer became widely known; her books, enthusiastically reviewed, quickly found their way onto reading lists from middle school to university literature classes.
As of September, 2000, Cisneros has published (in book form) no more fiction except for a bilingual expansion for very young readers of a short section from Mango Street: Hairs: Pelitos, illustrated by Terry Ybanez and published by Knopf. Her books of poetry include Bad Boys (Mango Publications, 1980); My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Third Woman Press, 1987); and Loose Woman (Knopf, 1994). She has contributed to a variety of periodicals, including Contact II, Glamour, Imagine, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Revista Chicano-Riquena, and Village Voice.
