A romantic and a populist, Jimmy Santiago Baca celebrates nature and creativity in Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande. These poems form an expansive meditation on Baca’s spiritual life, punctuated always with his feet––repeatedly, rhythmically––as he runs the boulder-strewn trails along the banks of the Rio Grande each morning and contemplates his old life, his new love, his homily and friends, those living and those dead, and where he prays to the Creator for the humility to become “more the river than myself." Born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and was later sent with his brother to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a federal 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 Champion of the International Poetry Slam, winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, the Pushcart Prize, and, for his memoir A Place to Stand, the prestigious International Award.