Christopher Soto is a poet based in Los Angeles. A 2019 CantoMundo fellow, they are the author of the chapbook Sad Girl Poems and the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. They were honored with Them’s 2022 Now Award in literature for representing the cutting-edge of queer culture. In debut poetry collection Diaries of a Terrorist (Copper Canyon Press), Soto demands the abolition of policing and human caging. Throughout, they use the “we” pronoun to emphasize that police violence happens not only to individuals, but to whole communities. Their poetics open the imagination to possibilities of existence beyond the status quo. Soto asks, Who do we call terrorist, & why? These political surrealist poems shift between gut-wrenching vulnerability, laugh-aloud humor, and unapologetic queer punk raunchiness. Diaries of a Terrorist is groundbreaking in its ability to speak, from a local to a global scale, about one of the most important issues of our time.
