Baseball in April and Other Stories

Born in 1952 in Fresno, California, Gary Soto attended Fresno City College and California State University-Fresno before becoming the first Mexican American to earn his master of fine arts from the University of California Irvine. Since then, he has written more than a dozen collections of poems for adults and has garnered numerous awards. He has also earned fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In addition to penning poetry, he has written short story collections for young adults, like Baseball In April and Other Stories and the award-winning Petty Crimes. He has also written a children’s book series in Spanish and English, featuring a cat named Chato who lives in a barrio in East Los Angeles. Soto’s longer works are geared toward young adults and include his autobiographical collection of nonfiction essays, Living Up the Street, and the young adult novels Jesse and Buried Onions. Soto has also crafted plays and musicals, and some of his work has been adapted for film. His many accolades include but are not limited to the 1999 Literature Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation and the Author-Illustrator Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association.