Born in Chicago to working-class parents—her father was an upholsterer, her mother a factory worker—Cisneros spent her early years shuttling between the United States and her father's family home in Mexico City. After studying at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, she settled in Texas in a house on the San Antonio River, though she has also been a writer in residence at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Irvine. Her published work includes not only poetry but also experimental collections of fiction and sketches. The House on Mango Street (1983) and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) are her most famous works of fiction.