Gary Soto: A Brief Biography

Gary Soto is a poet, essayist, short-story writer, novelist, dramatist, and a celebrant of adolescent life. His works take his readers to “ground level” to the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of growing up in Fresno, California, a farming community with big-city overtones.

Soto first found his writing voice through poetry, working with Philip Levine and other poets of the Fresno School to chronicle the life of his family and friends as they toiled in the fields and factories of California’s Central Valley. Soto has won many awards throughout his writing career and his poetry in particular has warranted many acknowledgements which include the Bess Hokin Prize for poetry.

Soto’s early poetry was written for an adult audience. It details a grim life of hard work, violence, despair, family relationships, and grief over the loss of the innocence of childhood. His later work, however, has spoken to children as well as adults, and it celebrates the human ability to overcome such difficulties and focuses on people’s loyalty, humor and kindness.

In the mid-1980’s, Soto began experimenting with prose, producing collections of memoirs and short stories. His first collection of memoirs, Living up the Street, received the American Book Award, both for its depictions of childhood and adolescence and for its poetic language. Since that time, he has written for children ,adolescents, young adults, and adults, producing picture books, poetry, collections of short works, plays and – more recently – novels, all of which reflect his love of language, youth and Hispanic culture.