Gary Soto

Introduction:

The reason why i chose Gary Soto is because i find that his poems are different from any other poems i read before. His poems are very lively and hilarious. Whenever i am feeling down, i would take out his poems to read and i would be cheerful again. About his work, the writer Joyce Carol Oates once said, "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 live."

Thesis:

In my opinion, i feel that he is indeed a very remarkable person. He writes poem very well and won numerous amount of awards. His honors include the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum, The Nation/"Discovery" Prize, and the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine. He has also received fellowships from the California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In the papers, i will cover about all his greay achievements that he had gained.

Historical context:

Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California, in April, 1952, to working-class Mexican-American parents. At a young age, he worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. He was not academically motivated as a child, but became interested in poetry during his high school years.

He attended Fresno City college and California State University at Fresno while working toward an undergraduate degree, and later studied poetry at the University of California, Irvine, where he earned his MFA in 1976. After that, he started writing poems and won many awards.

3 of his poems:

-The Elements of San Joaquin

-Where Sparrows Work Hard

-Neighborhood Odes


Sources:
www.google.com.sg
www.poets.org