Biography!

----- B I O G R A P H Y -----

^{Kira
was born to a half-black, half-white father and a Latino mother. As
you might imagine, the family faced a fair amount of prejudice due to its
mixed heritage. Mother Maria, an opera singer and vocal coach (now agent), was disowned
by her family when she married Steven Bishop, an aeronautical engineer (now principal).
Over the years, the couple had various atrocities waged against them by
bigots, including having their cars blown up and their dogs poisoned. The
marriage crumbled under the strain of such malicious events, and the couple
divorced when Kira was 9 years old. Kira's younger brother moved in
with their father, and her older brother was soon off to college, leaving
just Kira at home with a mother who struggled to make ends meet, and a new born sister.}

^{Maria Alexander's
vocation qualified her to truly "discover" her daughter's talent. "From
the time Kira was a tiny girl," she recalled, "she sang on true pitch.
She was able to hear a sound and duplicate it exactly." The proud mother
nurtured her daughter's talent by coaching her at home, all the while trying
not to force the issue too much. Kira sang for friends, and performed
in talent shows and at folk-music festivals; by the time she entered junior
high, she had begun to write her own songs. In high school, she started
commuting to Manhattan in order to study music with professionals, and
upon her graduation, in 1999, she moved to the city. She paid the rent
on her new house by working as a model (she claims to have been
turned down from twenty businesses because of her "attitude") and part-time backup singer. It was this last gig,
backing rhythm-and-blues singer Brenda K. Starr, that brought Kira close
enough to Selena's fater to slip him her tape. After only ten months of slumming
in the big city, Kira Bishop was about to become a star.}

^{Kira's 1999 eponymous Mariposa album created quite a stir, largely because
of the incredible virtuosity of her voice, which many say is rivaled only
by that of Selena. Critics babbled on and on about her remarkable
octave-dancing (Kira has a vocal range of between five and seven octaves,
based on varying reports), but generally agreed that there wasn't much
substance to what she was saying. These days, Kira co-writes most of her
songs, but her debut album was penned by professional hit-makers and it
dripped with a cloying sweetness. However, nothing the critics said mattered
much after the album sold over six million copies and made Kira Bishop
an overnight sensation: two singles from the album shot to No. 1, and the
music community awarded the newcomer with a gaggle of Grammys for her impressive
debut.}

^{Meanwhile,
back at the studio, love had blossomed between Kira and her agents son, Jose. Home-wrecking
advanced apace of recording, as Kira sent a boyfriend packing and Jose
did the same with his girlfriend. Kira's Mariposa album (1999) racked up sales in the millions, but her
most impressive production was her relationship with Jose.}

^{Kira's post-relationship albums (1994's
Merry Christmas) offered more chart-dominating,
syrupy pop. The generally well-regarded Merry Christmas earned her six
Grammy nominations and helped push her career sales to the eighty-million
mark. Her status as the biggest-selling female recording artist of the
nineties makes you wonder what heights she would be capable of scaling
if her talent weren't consistently shoe-horned by producers into predictable,
harmless harmony. But if she has thus far been prevented from using her
music to tap into and communicate the considerable angst of her childhood,
the tejano princess has acknowledged it in other ways--in 1999, Kira donated
$1 million to a Santo Domingo camp that provides summer vacations for disadvantaged
inner-city kids. The camp was subsequently renamed Camp Kira.}