Floyd SalasBorn in Walsenberg, Colorado, in 1931, of pioneer Spanish stock, Floyd Salas grew up on West Coast city streets, in a juvenile detention home, in a Salvation Army institute for children from broken homes, and in a county jail farm. After working as aconstruction laborer, bar boy, freight clerk, salesman, pot washer, reporter, and in a dozen other trades, he won a boxing scholarship to the University of California in September, 1956. Two years later, supporting a wife and child on odd jobs, he won a writing scholarship to El Centro Mexicano de Escritores in Mexico City. In 1964, his novel Tattoo the Wicked Cross, still in unfinished form, won him the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and then a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship at San Francisco State College, where he earned his master's degree in 1966. Tattoo the Wicked Cross was written seven times over the course of four and a half years. Floyd Salas currently lives and writes in Berkeley, California.
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