I'm very pleased to be able to introduce to you tonight
Luis Alberto Urrea.
In particular, I am pleased to welcome him
because we've made him work very hard and he's still on his feet,
and we're absolutely delighted.
He spent some time at Rincon University High this morning.
I think some students are here from that event.
And that was, I think, an important connection
that we were happy to make between some
of the literary resources that meet the University and younger
readers and students of poetry.
Luis Urrea was born in Tijuana, Mexico
to an American mother and a Mexican father.
One can say that the border crosses in his own body.
In fact, central to his life and his artistic work.
He graduated from the University of California, San Diego.
Has done relief work on the Mexican border.
And later, taught expository writing at Harvard.
He's the author of a book of poems, The Fever of Being,
which won the Western States Book Award, a novel,
In Search of Snow, two non-fiction books,
Across The Wire: Life and Hard Times on The Mexican Border,
which won a 1994 Christopher Award
and was a New York Times notable book of the year,
and just out, By The Lake of Sleeping Children:
The Secret Life of the Mexican Border.
A writer who never seems to stand still, he also
has a new poetry book coming out called Ghost Sickness
that will be published by Cinco Punto Press in El Paso.
And he's just finished a new nonfiction
book set in the Rocky Mountains, titled Wandering Time Western
Notebooks.
Common to all of his books are a poet's attention to language
and an intensity of focus.
The influences on his poetry range
from Sting to Steve McQueen, Sherman Alexie, José Emilio
Pacheco, and A.R. Ammons.
Whether he is fictionally portraying the absurdities
of masculinity or documenting with impeccable clarity
the strained lives of garbage pickers and relief
workers along the border or exploring
the music of his imagination in his pleasingly strange and
expansive poems, this is a writer
devoted to the possibilities that language can open.
Please welcome Luis Urrea.
[APPLAUSE]