Born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison at the age of twenty-one that he began to turn his life around: there he learned to read and write and found his passion for poetry. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (New Directions 2004); three books of fiction, including The Importance of a Piece of Paper (Grove/Atlantic 2004) and A Place to Stand (Grove/Atlantic 2001); and several film scripts, including The Lone Wolf - The Story of Pancho Gonzalez, which was produced by HBO. He is the winner of various awards and prizes, including the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the National Poetry Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, and the prestigious International Award.
