Margins
Why I Don't Write Children's Literature book cover
Why I Don't Write Children's Literature
2015
First Published
3.41
Average Rating
216
Number of Pages

Gary Soto is a poet and, in his previous writing life, author of children’s literature. Moreover, he is an essayist whose works, such as Living Up the Street, A Summer Life, and What Poets Are Like, were celebrated for their openness and vivid image-making. In this collection, the poet again offers prose that is robust, confessional, and peculiar in its observations. He addresses time. He considers aging. If each day of the week represented a decade, then Soto is now cruising late Saturday afternoon. As the clock’s gears relentlessly grind, he’s soon on Sunday—but Sunday morning! He still has time to enjoy the world about him. Soto is a master essayist. His sharply refined sentences are worth a second read, and often a pencil in hand. Soto’s world is quirky, captured in narrative that will soften readers with laughter and empathy. Like many boomers, he laments his sense of failure. Like them, he shrugs off that failure to recast his remaining years. He befriends daffodils, praises theater and tribute bands, and snuggles up with his wife of nearly forty years. This book is short enough to read in one sitting on the couch and encourages a second reading with deeper pleasure in bed.

Avg Rating
3.41
Number of Ratings
27
5 STARS
11%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
11%
goodreads

Author

Gary Soto
Gary Soto
Author · 55 books
Gary Soto is the author of eleven poetry collections for adults, most notably New and Selected Poems, a 1995 finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry International, and Poetry, which has honored him with the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Award and by featuring him in the interview series Poets in Person. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. For ITVS, he produced the film “The Pool Party,” which received the 1993 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Film Excellence. In 1997, because of his advocacy for reading, he was featured as NBC’s Person-of-the-Week. In 1999, he received the Literature Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Author-Illustrator Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association, and the PEN Center West Book Award for Petty Crimes. He divides his time between Berkeley, California and his hometown of Fresno.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved