Poet, novelist, and journalist Margarita Engle was born in Pasadena, California, to a Cuban mother and an American father. She earned a BS from California State Polytechnic University and an MS from Iowa State University, and she studied for her doctoral degree in biology at the University of California, Riverside. From June 2017 to June 2019, she served as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate. Engle lives in central California and has taught agronomy at California State Polytechnic University.