I was born in California in 1978 to Mexican parents.  My father runs his own landscaping business and my mother, now retired, was a special education teacher. I am the middle of three brothers—Luis the eldest, Albert the youngest. 

I spent the first eight years of my life residing in Mecca, California—a sparsely-populated migrant town 35 miles south of Palm Springs.  Then in 1986, my parents moved us 15 miles north to Indio—The City of Fesitvals and my birthplace (you might know Indio as the host of the Coachella Music Festival).  Along with Luis and Albert, I landscaped with my Dad at the near-by resort towns of Indian Wells, Palm Desert, and Palm Springs, while at home my mother cultivated my artistic talents.

At 18, I moved out of Indio and into Riverside where I attended the University of California there and where I studied poetry under Christopher Buckley.  I graduated with two degrees—one in sociology and the other in creative writing.  A few months before graduation in 2000, Gary Soto published a short collection of my poems as Gardeners of Eden under his Chicano Chapbook Series (#28).

After graduation from UCR and with a generous grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, I entered the MFA creative writing program at Arizona State University at Tempe under the tutelage of Alberto Ríos, Jeannine Savard, Beckian Fitz-Goldberg, Norman Dubie, and fiction writer Ron Carlson.  Before I graduated from the program in 2004 with an emphasis in poetry my second chapbook Aluminum Times (2002) was published by Swan Scythe Press and I was awarded a 2002 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

My work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Quarterly West, Poetry International, RATTLE: Poetry for the 21^st Century, and From the Fishouse: An Audio Archive of Emerging Poets, among other journals and anthologies. The work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times. I have been a participant of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop since 2004 and have been a resident at The Vermont Studio Center and The National Book Foundation Summer Writing Camp. In 2009 I was a poet-in-residence at The Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Also in 2009, The Date Fruit Elegies was a finalist for The Northern California Book Award in Poetry.

Since 2004 I have been living, writing, and teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2008, Bilingual Review Press published my first full-length poetry collection, The Date Fruit Elegies, which was the inaugural book to their new Chicana/o, Latina/o poetry series, Canto Cosas. In that same year, I married la Tejana from Macalen, Mónica, a speech language pathologist. We live in San José.