Christopher Soto

Obidigbo Nzeribe

Christopher Soto is a Salvadoran poet and abolitionist based in Tovaangar (Los Angeles, California). He currently works for UCLA’s Ethnic Studies Research Centers, and he also teaches at UCLA’s Honors College. He has previously taught at NYU where he received his MFA in Poetry and was a Goldwater Hospital Writing Fellow, Columbia University as a June Jordan Teaching Corp Fellow, and at Occidental College as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He previously interned with the Poetry Society of America and he served on the Board of Directors with Lambda Literary. 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.

Books by this author

Awards and Honors

National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, 2021

CantoMundo Fellow, 2019

June Jordan Teaching Corp Fellow at Columbia University, 2o17

Split This Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, 2017

Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award, 2016

Goldwater Hospital Writing Fellow at NYU, 2015