Dick Wolf, the producer of the Law & Order shows is 61 today.
Author Sandra Cisneros is 53.
It’s the birthday of the poet and novelist Sandra Cisneros, born in Chicago in 1954. When she was growing up, her Mexican-born father would often have bouts of nostalgia for the home country, and he would force the whole family to go back there for a few months.
She went on to college, and she later said she was lucky to be a girl, because her father didn’t care what she studied. He just expected her to meet her husband. So she was free to study an impractical subject like English. She kept writing, and one of her professors encouraged her to apply to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
But once Cisneros got there, she felt totally out of place. She said, “My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city’s cracks.” One day, her class was given an exercise to think about the houses they’d grown up in. Cisneros’s family had only owned one house, an ugly red bungalow. Listening to her classmates describe their childhood homes, she realized that she had grown up in a completely different world. She said, ” It was not until this moment when I separated myself, when I considered myself truly distinct, that my writing acquired a voice. … That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about.”