Luís Alberto Urrea

Luís Alberto Urrea in 2009. Photo by Larry D. Moore. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Luís Alberto Urrea (born 1955) is a Mexican-American poet, novelist, essayist, and academic.

Life

Urrea was born in Tijuana, Mexico, the son of a Mexican father and an American mother. He attended the University of California, San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana, and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard University. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College, and the University of Colorado, and he was the writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, Illinois, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In two heavily researched historical novels, The Hummingbird's Daughter and Queen of America, Urrea tells the story of his great aunt, Teresita Urrea, who was known as "The Saint of Cabora" and "The Mexican Joan of Arc".

The Devil's Highway is his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert.

Urrea was a speaker at the 2008 Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and the 2008 Banned Books Week Read-Out, Chicago.

Recognition

Urrea's debut volume, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award.

In 1994, he won the Colorado Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being, as well as the Western States Book Award in poetry. He was also included in The Best American Poetry 1996 anthology.

In 1999, Urrea won an American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life.

His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine.

In 2000, he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos.

The Devil's Highway won the 2004 Lannan Literary Award, the Border Regional Library Association's Southwest Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. It was also optioned for a film by CDI Producciones. The book was adopted as the 2010 One Book for Sac State

His short story "Amapola" won the Edgar Award in 2010 for best mystery short story. It can be found in the anthology Phoenix Noir.

Publications

Poetry

• The Fever of Being: Poems. Albuquerque, NM: West End Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0-931122-78-1
• Ghost Sickness. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 199. ISBN 978-0-938317-30-2
• Vatos (with photo by José Galvez). El Paso, TXCinco Puntos Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-938317-52-4
• Tijuana Book of the Dead. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2015.

Novels

• In Search of Snow: A novel. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-8165-2015-2
• The Hummingbird's Daughter: A novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. ISBN 978-0-316-74546-8; New York: Back Bay Books, 2011.
• Into the Beautiful North: A novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. ISBN 978-0-316-02527-0
• Queen of America. Boston, MA, & London: Little, Brown, 2011. ISBN 978-0-316-15486-4
• The House of Broken Angels: A novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2018.

Short fiction

• Six Kinds of Sky: A collection of short fiction. El Paso, TX: Cinco Punto Press, 2002.
• The Water Museum: Stories. New York: Little, Brown, 2015.

Non-fiction

• Across the Wire: Life and hard times on the Mexican border (with photos by John Lueders-Booth). New York: Anchor Books, 1993. ISBN 978-0-385-42530-8
• By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The secret life of the Mexican border. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. ISBN 978-0-385-48419-0
• The Devil's Highway: A true story. New York: Little, Brown, 2004 ISBN 978-0-316-74671-7; New York: Back Bay Books, 2014.
• Haunted Arizona. Tucson, AZ: Tucson-Pima Public Library, Southwest Literature Project, 2004.
• Underground America: Narratives of undocumented lives. Verso, 2017.

Memoirs

• • The Wandering Time: Western notebooks. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999. ISBN978-0-8165-1866-1
• Nobody's Son: Notes from an American life. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-8165-2270-5

Anthologized

• The Best American Poetry, 1996 (edited by by Adrienne Cecile Rich & David Lehman). New York: Scribner, 1996.
• Camino del Sol: Fifteen years of Latina and Latino writing (edited by Rigoberto González). Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2010.

The answer, and then the question Luis Urrea TEDxSitka

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets
• List of Chicano poets

External links

Poems

•  "Walking Backward in the Dark". Virginia Quarterly Review. Spring 2007. http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/spring/urrea-walking-backward/. 
• Luis Alberto Urrea at the Poetry Foundation

Audio / video

• "Four Corners: One Book author Luis Alberto Urrea", Kinsee Morlan, KSUT, 2009

Books

• Luis Albert Urrea at Amazon.com

About

• Luís Alberto Urrea Official website
• "Conversations". Waterbridge Review. September 2006. http://www.waterbridgereview.org/092006/cnv_urrea.php.