It’s the birthday of Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), best known for her coming-of-age novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), about a Latina girl growing up in Chicago. The novel is frequently assigned in schools and universities and has sold more than six million copies in twenty-some languages.

Cisneros was born in Chicago to a Mexican father and a Chicana mother, and in one interview described where she grew up as “the leftovers of the city.” (See the interview here.) She had six brothers and no sisters, and her brothers used to tease her that she’d grow up, get married, and change her name, so she wasn’t a “real” Cisneros. But she knew by the age of 11 that she wanted her name on a book.

Cisneros graduated from Loyola University in Chicago in 1976 and studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where as a woman of color from a working class background she had a horrible experience. She has said that being at the Workshop taught her how she didn’t want to write and how she didn’t want to teach. She graduated with her M.F.A. in 1978. Her first book was a chapbook of poetry, Bad Boys (1980), followed by The House on Mango Street, which is a novel in vignettes. Her other collections of poetry include My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987) and Loose Woman: Poems (1994), and her fiction includes a short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), and the novel Caramelo (2002). She’s also written a children’s book, Hairs (1994), and a picture book for grownups, Have You Seen Marie? (2012). Her latest book is a collection of essays, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (2015), which won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for creative nonfiction and gets a whopping 4.26 stars on Goodreads. (That is seriously impressive.) Cisneros has won many awards and honors, and in 2016 was presented with a National Medal for the Arts by fellow Chicagoan President Obama.

By leaving home for school and never marrying or having children, Cisneros broke wildly with her family’s cultural tradition. She lived for many years in Texas, where she felt much more at home than in Chicago, and now lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with several little yippy dogs (just an observation, not a judgment) and several palm trees.

Have a better, brighter day than you’re expecting and stay scrupulously honest to the data.