Helena María Viramontes has written short stories and poems influenced by her Chicana heritage and has also edited two anthologies of work by Chicana writers. She began writing poetry in college, receiving a graduate degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. In her work Viramontes focuses on the struggles of women in Chicano culture, writing mostly about friends and family and using stream-of-consciousness narratives and multiple narrators. She is an assistant professor of English at Cornell University.