This is an accepted version of this page Gary Anthony Soto (born April 12, 1952) is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.

[1] Soto notes that in spite of his early academic record, while at high school he found an interest in poetry through writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Jules Verne, Robert Frost and Thornton Wilder.

He states that he wanted to become a writer in college after discovering the novelist Gabriel García Márquez and the contemporary poets Edward Field, W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic, James Wright and Pablo Neruda, whom he calls "the master of them all.

[5] Soto lives in northern California, dividing his time between Berkeley and Fresno, but is no longer teaching.

Regarding his relationship with the Mexican-American community, Soto commented "as a writer, my duty is not to make people perfect, particularly Mexican Americans.

[1] About his work Joyce Carol Oates noted "Gary Soto's poems are fast, funny, heartening, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life.

[2] In 2011, the Old Administration Building at Fresno City College became the permanent home of the Gary Soto Literary Museum.