The next reading in this series will
be Terry Tempest Williams reading April 6 at 8 o'clock
in this auditorium.
Luis Alberto Urrea has four books of nonfiction--
Across The Wire, [AUDIO OUT] Children,
Nobody's Son, and Wandering Time.
He has two books of poetry, one of which
won the Western States Award, The Fever of Being and Ghost
Sickness.
He is working on a novel on Teresita, the Saint of Cabora.
And he has a novel, In Search of Snow.
Luis currently teaches at the University of Southwestern
Louisiana and will be accepting a position next semester,
a permanent position, at the University of Chicago.
Luis Urrea is nobody's son, a child
of the border with a Mexican father and an Anglo mother.
He can write literary English with the same ease
he writes street Spanish and with equal effectiveness
and incredible speed and energy.
He often makes a mockery of the standard literary genres,
writes on the border between them
or crosses the borders in wild and daring raids,
carrying a load of language and shouting with success.
He is at the same time one of the most and one
of the least literary of writers writing today.
His work is built on profound tensions underlying
various cultures, various economic strata,
both between and within Mexico and between
and within the United States.
And yet, it deals always with individuals.
His work vacillates between being insanely tender
and tenderly insane.
There's nobody else like him.
Please welcome back to Tucson Luis Alberto Urrea.
[APPLAUSE]