by Victor Martinez

Victor Martinez, the fourth of 12 children, was born into poverty in 1954 and raised in Fresno, California. Like many Mexican Americans in Fresno, he worked in the fields. After graduating high school, he was able through an affirmative action program to attend California State University at Fresno, where he studied poetry with Philip Levine. Martinez also attended Stanford University, where he took graduate courses in creative writing. Over the years Martinez has also held various jobs: welder, truck driver, firefighter, teacher, and office clerk. Known before Parrot in the Oven as a short-story writer and poet, he is the author of Caring for a House (1992), a collection of poems, and a contributor to the High Plains Literary Review and The Bloomsbury Review. In Parrot in the Oven, Martinez broadens the scope of the coming-of-age novel, exploring...