Victor Manuel Valle is a poet, translator, editor, activist, and investigative journalist whose creative vision is rooted in the history of the valley of Los Angeles. Although Valle's poetry has motivated the rest of his work, his journalistic efforts have dominated his publications in recent years. Through his work as a translator, he has a thorough knowledge of contemporary Latin-American literature, which provides him with a hemispheric perspective. He is in the vanguard of Chicano literary and cultural affairs in Southern California.

Valle was born on 10 November 1950 and raised in Whittier, California; he was part of a family of dairy workers, former villistas (followers of Pancho Villa), and other political exiles in the family's third generation of life in the United States. In his own words, Valle had "a rather mundane public life and education. However, privately, I learned to raise mockingbirds, gorreones [sparrows], pigeons, crows, lizards, deer...