Gary soto biography pdf

Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California on April 12, 1952, to working-class Mexican American parents. As a teenager and college student, he worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, chopping beets and cotton and picking grapes.

He was not academically motivated as a child, but he became interested in poetry during his high school years. He attended Fresno City College and California State University–Fresno, and he earned an MFA from the University of California–Irvine in 1976.

His first collection of poems, The Elements of San Joaquin (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1976 and was published in 1977.

Since then, Soto has published numerous books of poetry, including You Kiss by th’ Book: New Poems from Shakespeare’s Line (Chronicle Books, 2016), A Simple Plan (Chronicle Books, 2007), and New and Selected Poems (Chronicle Books, 1995), which was a fin