Luis alberto urrea biography template
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Transcription by Alletta Cooper
Krista Tippett: We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, and yet this makes us a little crazy, as Luis Alberto Urrea observes. What a refreshing, helpful way into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us. This wise and exuberant writer says that a deep truth of our time is that “we miss each other.” And the Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could get when he was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. Ever since I had this conversation with him, I have not heard a news report of something happening at the southern border of my country without having his voice in my head, confounding every caricature of Mexicans — and the suffering human beings we now call “migrants.” I am also eternally grateful for the way he complicated my imagination about the moral ag
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Bringing the Joy: A Profile of Luis Alberto Urrea
The novel Good Night, Irene tells the story of two American women who joined the American Red Cross Clubmobile service during World War II, forged a friendship while seeing and experiencing untold horrors at the front line, and ended up in hugely different circumstances. It’s the kind of novel you’d expect to see from, say, Kristin Hannah—and, in fact, Hannah has blurbed Good Night, Irene, calling it “powerful, uplifting, and deeply personal.”
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Good Night, Irene. (Credit: Emily Melissa)
But the spring 2023 lead title from Little, Brown, forthcoming at the end of May, wasn’t written by Hannah or another woman. This epic journey told from a female perspective comes to us from none other than Luis Alberto Urrea, the acclaimed author of books about Mexico and Mexican American families, including nonfiction reportage like The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (Little, Brown, 2004) and Across the Wi
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Luis Alberto Urrea
Luis Alberto Urrea is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and essayist.Urrea's native Mexico has always served as his muse, inspiring all of his books that span fem genres. His nonfiction book The Devil’s Highway tells the harrowing story of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. Urrea’s novels The Hummingbird’s Daughter and its sequel, Queen of America, chronicle the life of beloved healer Teresita Urrea, deemed “the Mexican Joan of Arc.” His novel The House of Broken Angels was inspired by the death of his eldest brother.
Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea grew up along both sides of the border, forever affected by its dichotomy, brutality and richness, saying, “Borders everywhere are a emblem of what divides us. That’s what interests me.” He lives in Naperville, Illinois, where he fryst vatten a distinguished professor of creative wr