Barebacking the Barback by Christopher Soto

By Christopher Soto

About the author:

Christopher Soto is a Salvadoran poet and abolitionist based in Tovaangar (Los Angeles, California). He currently works as the Assistant Director of Development for UCLA’s Ethnic Studies Research Centers, and he also teaches at UCLA’s Honors College. He is the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018) and the author of the limited-print chapbook Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016). He co-founded the Undocupoets Campaign, which successfully lobbied numerous poetry publishers in the United States to remove proof of citizenship requirements from first-book contests. He cofounded Writers for Migrant Justice to protest the detention and separation of migrant families in the U.S. He has also organized with the Cops Off Campus movement and he has worked at Equal Justice USA to end the death penalty. His poems, reviews, interviews, and articles can be found at The Nation, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, Literary Hub, and Tin House, among others. He identifies as nonbinary and also uses “they” pronouns.

Image courtesy of Copper Canyon Press