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 Festivals and my birthplace.  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 graduating 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.

Since moving out of Arizona the year of my graduation, I’ve settled in the Bay Area where I teach writing, literature, and ethnic studies at The National Hispanic University in San Jóse, CA.  Bilingual Press will publish my full-length collection of poetry entitled The Date Fruit Elegies in 2008.  It will be the inaugural book to their new Chicana/o, Latina/o poetry line, Canto Cosas.

And as of 2007, I have been engaged to la Tejana from Macalen, Mónica.