With her fiction and poetry Sandra Cisneros creates poignant stories and brings an original twist to universal themes, notably love. Yet, as Jim Sagel in Publishers Weekly pointed out, "Cisneros knows her characters live in an America very different from that of her potential readers." Proud of her heritage and gender, Cisneros offers compelling portraits of Chicanos and Latinos--Americans of Mexican and Latin-American descent respectively--and displays a powerful and lyrical use of language born of her training in poetry. The author's first fictional work, The House on Mango Street, revolves around a young, female protagonist and was acknowledged by Washington Post Book World contributor Susan Wood as "something of an underground classic." Ilan Stavans, writing in Commonweal, added that the book is "a composite of evocative snapshots that manages to passionately recreate the milieu of the poor quarters of Chicago." In an interview with Authors & Artists for Young...