who has influenced Cisneros?

The House on Mango Street is Sandra Cisneros' first major work. Even though she periodically wrote poems and stories throughout her childhood and adolescence, it was not until she attended the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in the late 1970s that she realized her experiences as a Latina woman were unique and outside the realm of dominant American culture. In a discussion of archetypal memories about homes, Cisneros realized that her peers' ideas, imagination and experience were completely different from her own.

Thus it was that The House on Mango Street was born and Cisneros discovered what she terms her "first love," a fascination with speech and voices.