Luís Alberto Urrea
Luís Alberto Urrea (born 1955 Tijuana, Mexico) is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and essayist.
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[edit] Life
Urrea is 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.[1]
In two heavily researched historical novels, The Hummingbird's Daughter and Queen of America, Urea 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.
Urea was a speaker at the 2008 Santa Barbara Writers Conference,[2] and the 2008 Banned Books Week Read-Out, Chicago.[3]
[edit] Awards
Urrea's first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award.
In 1994, he won the 1994 Colorado Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being[4] as well as the Western States Book Award in poetry. He was also included in The 1996 Best American Poetry collection.
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,[5] the Border Regional Library Association's Southwest Book Award [6] 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[7]
His short story "Amapola" won the Edgar Award in 2010 for best mystery short story. It can be found in the anthology Phoenix Noir.
[edit] Bibliography
- Poetry
- The Fever of Being. West End Press. 1994. ISBN 9780931122781.
- Ghost Sickness. Cinco Puntos Press. 1997. ISBN 9780938317302.
- Vatos. Cinco Puntos Press. 2000. ISBN 9780938317524.
- "Walking Backwards in thee Dark". Virginia Quarterly Review. Spring 2007. http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/spring/urrea-walking-backwards/.
- Short Stories
- Six Kinds of Sky. Cinco Puntos Press. 2002. ISBN 9780938317630. http://books.google.com/?id=ovxrq4l9n3sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Lu%C3%ADs+Alberto+Urrea.
- Novels
- In Search of Snow. University of Arizona Press. 1999. ISBN 9780816520152.
- The Hummingbird's Daughter. Little, Brown and Company. 2005. ISBN 9780316745468. http://books.google.com/?id=cpEwohMsgg8C&dq=Lu%C3%ADs+Alberto+Urrea&printsec=frontcover.
- Into the Beautiful North. Little, Brown and Company. 2009. ISBN 9780316025270.
- Queen of America. Little, Brown and Company. 2011. ISBN 9780316154864.
- Memoirs
- Wandering Time: Western Notebooks. University of Arizona Press. 1999. ISBN 9780816518661.
- Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life. University of Arizona Press. 2002. ISBN 9780816522705.
- Non-Fiction
- Across the wire: life and hard times on the Mexican border. Anchor Books. 1993. ISBN 9780385425308.
- By the Lake of Sleeping Children. Anchor Books. 1996. ISBN 9780385484190.
- The Devil's Highway. Little, Brown and Company. 2004. ISBN 9780316746717. http://books.google.com/?id=CCf2YQP6kK8C&dq=Lu%C3%ADs+Alberto+Urrea&printsec=frontcover.
- Interviews
- "On Standing at Neruda’s Tomb: An interview with Martín Espada". Poetry Foundation. 2006. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=179395.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=82687
- ^ Brett Leigh Dicks (June 19, 2008). "Luis Alberto Urrea to Speak at S.B. Writers Conference". Santa Barbara Independent. http://www.independent.com/news/2008/jun/19/luis-alberto-urrea-speak-writers-conference/.
- ^ http://alfocus.ala.org/tags/luis-alberto-urrea
- ^ List of Winners, 1991-2007, accessed 18 July 2010.
- ^ http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/luis-alberto-urrea/
- ^ "BRLA 2004 Southwest Book Awards." Border Regional Library Association. 2008. Web. 26 July 2009.
- ^ 7
http://www.csus.edu/sacstatenews/Articles/2010/09/one-book-continues-with-the-devils-highway.html
[edit] External links
- Author's website
- "Four Corners: One Book author Luis Alberto Urrea", Kinsee Morlan, KSUT, 2009
- "Conversations". Waterbridge Review. September 2006. http://www.waterbridgereview.org/092006/cnv_urrea.php.
- American novelists
- American poets
- American essayists
- American memoirists
- American writers of Mexican descent
- Mexican emigrants to the United States
- University of Louisiana at Lafayette faculty
- University of Illinois at Chicago faculty
- University of California, San Diego alumni
- University of Colorado alumni
- Harvard University staff
- People from Tijuana
- 1955 births
- Living people
- Hispanic and Latino American novelists
