Monday, August 24, 2009 - Luis Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother. He is an award-winning poet and essayist, author of 11 books. The Devil's Highway, his non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the 2004 Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. A national best-seller, The Devil's Highway was also named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and many other publications. He’s also author of Across the Wire, a memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, and a book of shot stories, Six Kinds of Sky. His most recent novel was The Hummingbird's Daughter and now he’s out with a new book, Into the Beautiful North, a story that is part social satire and part genuine, if cheerfully irreverent historical revisionism. Inspired by the film “The Magnificent Seven,” an unlikely group from the small Mexican village of Tres Camarones embarks on a journey to find their own seven protectors, to save the town from drug dealers who have moved in after all the men in town have gone to the beautiful north for work. Urrea’s writing always challenges the hegemony of perspective and point of view, and this laugh of out loud funny, political adventure story about three attractive teenage girls and a gay man takes on stereotypes and embraces pop culture in a story that will charm readers with its ensemble characters and its reconsideration of place and borders and its ironic take on idiom. Luis Alberto Urrea is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

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