Leonard Adame was born and raised in Fresno, California, where he grew up reading comic books, Steinbeck, and Hemingway. But as he approached high school graduation, he was compelled to consider how much his identity, his past, his present, and his future were tied to his Chicano ethnicity. He went on to earn his B.A. and M.A. in English from California State University at Fresno, studying under the poets Peter Everwine and Philip Levine. At CSU, he joined a group of Chicano poets including Gary Soto, Luis Omar Salinas, and Ernesto Trejo, now known as the Fresno School of Poets. Since then, he has contributed to numerous anthologies and journals such as the American Poetry Review, Greenfield Review, and others. He eventually became an instructor in La Raza Studies Department at CSU, Fresno, and he is still living in Fresno.

In 1979, Adame published a book of poems entitled Cantos pa' la memoria ("Songs for Memory"). In this book, he is rethinking the logic of history, allowing multiple disconnected images, characters, and events from his past and present life to coexist in one place. Observable reality often serves as a set of concrete certainties for Adame, but in the midst of this reality is a sense of uncertainty at the invisible world. In 1987, a selection of his work was published in Piecework as part of an issue dedicated to Fresno Poets. Here, he expressed his wish to bring to life Chicano culture's "indigenous past," which has been suppressed by Anglo culture. Since this publication, the Fresno Poets have become a recognizable group of accomplished poets, which may win Leonard Adame wider acclaim in the future.

" … my Spanish-speaking culture was a natural spring of identity and self-awareness, emotional support, and rejuvenating creative impulses and motifs, motivation and resilience," Adame told Piecework.