Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea is a Mexican-American writer born in Tijuana in 1955 to a Mexican father and an American mother; the family later settled in San Diego. He studied writing at the University of California, San Diego, and did graduate work at the University of Colorado Boulder, and has taught creative writing at Harvard University and, since, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he lives in nearby Naperville, Illinois. His nonfiction debut, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. Urrea is best known for two historical novels, The Hummingbird's Daughter and its sequel Queen of America, which trace the life of his great-aunt Teresita Urrea, a folk healer known as the Saint of Cabora, from rural Sinaloa to Gilded Age America. He has also published poetry, winning the Colorado Book Award for The Fever of Being.