Authors

Author Bio

I was born in Tijuana, Jewel of the Border, The Great Walled City of the Barbarian Chicimeca Empire. My father Alberto was from Rosario, Sinaloa. He claimed I was the seventh son of a seventh son - he was convinced I was a seer and a hippie. My mother Phyllis was from New York. She was a Woodward and a Dashiell. They're both gone now.

I was registered with the US Gov't as a US Citizen Born Abroad, thus circumventing many of the INS hassles many of my other relatives have faced. We lived on Rampa Independencia, in Colonia Independencia, where I contracted tuberculosis. When I was three or so, we moved to San Diego, living in Logan Heights. This was the largely African-American highlands above Barrio Logan (made famous by Juan Felipe Herrera's work and the place where I was baptized—Our Lady of Guadalupe! And where my daughter Chayo was also baptized—go Father Brown!).

We lived at 3935 National Avenue, and if you're in the 'hood right now, we were the bottom back apartment on the dirt alley. I went to St. Jude's, where the nuns beat my ass with yardsticks and the homies did it with fists.

Unexpectedly, we left the barrio and moved to a white suburb when I was in fifth grade. I attended Clairemont High School, which became famous as "Ridgemont High" and that was where I discovered writing. I was the first member of my family to graduate from college (The University of California-San Diego).

Once college was over, I hung out, dude. Me and my gang spent every night driving around with tankfuls of 35cent gas. I wrote lyrics for the San Diego prog-rock band, Harlequin. I fell in love a couple of hundred times. What I didn't want to do was go to grad school. I ended up working as a movie extra. I did cartoons for a bare breast magazine. And I wandered around being arty until I ended up working graveyard shift in a 7-11. You see, young writing majors? Your education can really get you places! (By the way, I finally did get to grad school at the University of Colorado-Boulder... got my degree in 1987. It only took me twenty years.)

Then, bless her soul, Ursula Le Guin published a story of mine in her anthology, Edges, in 1980. At that point, I had also met two remarkable men, shamans who would redirect my life.

Shaman # 1: Cesar Gonzalez at Mesa College. Cesar took me in off the streets and made me a bilingual TA and tutor in his Chicano Studies program. There, I finally learned grammar and punctuation. And Cesar and I edited the fine writing contest, Fragmentos de Barro.

Shaman # 2: Pastor Von. I started doing relief work on the Mexican border with him. You can read all about Von in Across the Wire and in By the Lake of Sleeping Children. Missionary work. Tijuana garbage dump. Blood, guts, wildfires, adventures, love and God.

Then, in 1982, Lowry Pei somehow orchestrated my being hired by Harvard (!) To teach Expository Writing and Fiction Workshops.

I've lived in Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston, Boulder, Tucson, Lafayette and Chicago. Stayed a long time in Sinaloa. Flitted into Canada and hung out in Mexico City. Did a month in France. Long to move back West. I'm in Chicago now, teaching at the University of Illinois.

I'm happily married to Cinderella. We have three kidlets: Eric, Megan and Rosario. We have a cat named Annie Oakley. And we have a parrot named Periquito.

My favorite place is Colorado. My favorite food is salad, though I'm a sucker for a good buffalo burger. I don't drink and I don't smoke and I, like everybody else in America today, have diabetes. I hate diabetes, but I love being alive. You can usually find Cinderella and me driving across America. Watch for me in South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Utah. I'll be driving my little brown van with Goth rock and Techno and Latino music blasting out the windows. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I will come back as Emiliano Zapata."

Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of Across the Wire, winner of the Christopher Award, and By the Lake of Sleeping Children. He is the recipient of an American Book Award, a Western States Book Award, and a Colorado Book Award, and he has been inducted into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry, and his most recent book, Six Kinds of Sky, won the 2003 ForeWord Magazine award for best book of the year. He and his family live outside Chicago.