Diaries of a Terrorist

Soto's book is extremely current and speaks to issues of public discussion, debate, and protest like police brutality, mass incarceration, immigration/border control, transgender rights, gender violence, and U.S. imperialism
A perfect fit for the times of "Abolish ICE" and "Defund the police"
Soto has deep activist roots in his work on Writers for Migrant Justice/Undocupoets
During the UndocuPoets campaign, Soto, Javier Zamora, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo helped make poetry first-book contests accessible to undocumented poets.
Soto is an important Latinx, nonbinary voice
Accessible, political poetry
As part of the queer Latinx punk/grind/hardcore scene in 2000s Los Angeles, Soto was the vocalist and lyricist of a band called The Ambulance Ride.
When they lived in Brooklyn in their early twenties, Soto -in the span of one night- met Björk, witnessed a famous drag queen "saying racist shit," and skated home at sunrise in their little black dress.
This wonderful Soto quote from Letras Latinas: "I want Angela Davis to blurb my first book when it's ready because I'm writing about the prison industrial complex and she was one of the first prison abolitionists that I read" and '[June Jordan's] "Poem about Police Violence" should be on every poetry syllabus right now and should be sung at every march right now.'
They are incredibly ambitious and creative when it comes to promoting their projects while also working for social justice, such as their "Tour to End Queer Youth Homelessness" for their 2016 chapbook, Sad Girl Poems.