Christopher Soto

Poet and activist Christopher Soto, who also uses the name Loma, is the son of El Salvadoran immigrants. He grew up in Los Angeles and earned an MFA at New York University. He is the author of Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016) and the chapbook How to Eat Glass (Still Life Press, 2012). Christopher Soto’s poems, reviews, interviews, and articles can be found at the Nation, the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry magazine, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Thai.

In his poems, Soto engages themes of intimacy, trauma, and identity. In a 2014 blog essay for VIDA, Soto writes, “At dinner she asked why I write such sad poems. And I told her, ‘My poems are not sad, they are masochistic.’ My poems like a good choking, a good spanking. They want to be bound and gagged and told what to do. There is a pleasure that my poems derive from being under such control; from having trauma recalled and then stripped of its agency.”

A founding editor of the literary journal Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color in collaboration with the Lambda Literary Foundation, Soto also helped found the Undocupoets Campaign, which has successfully lobbied numerous poetry publishers to remove a proof of citizenship requirement from first-book contests, allowing undocumented poets to participate. 

Soto lives in Los Angeles.