Diana García

Poet and teacher Diana García was born in the San Joaquin Valley, in a migrant farm labor camp owned by the California Packing Corporation. She earned a BA in English with a creative writing emphasis and an MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University. She is the author of the poetry collection When Living Was a Labor Camp (2000), which won the 2001 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
 
García is the director of the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University at Monterey Bay, and her own work is influenced by an acute awareness of the issues that affect impoverished, often minority, communities. In When Living Was a Labor Camp,she tells the stories of migrant-worker life; her poems are attuned to the specific sensory details of migrants’ lives, as well as the political ramifications of their experiences.
 
In 2009, García read for the Poetics of Labor reading series at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. She has taught for California Poets in the Schools and for Border Voice, based in San Diego.
 
Co-editor of Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing (2009), García has seen her own creative work published in the anthologies Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction (1993), El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poets (1997), and Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California (2002).