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.

Influenced by his own experiences of growing up in Central California and working as a field laborer in the San Joaquin Valley, Soto strives to create authentic characters whose flaws and imperfections highlight common issues in real life. To this end, Baseball in April and Other Stories features a broad range of Mexican American voices, and Soto uses his own life experiences as fodder for stories in which the young protagonists like Yollie in “Mother and Daughter” or Fausto in “The No-Guitar Blues” must grapple with financial hardships. His works often contain a combination of Spanish and English in order to reflect the multicultural experience of Chicanos in America. For example, when Victor speaks with his grandfather, their conversations are a mixture of the two languages. In addition to crafting stories that are designed to celebrate the voices of Mexican American youth, Soto’s writing aims to appeal to many children and adolescents.