Luis Alberto Urrea, Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the best-selling author of 18 books, including The Devil’s Highway and The Hummingbird’s Daughter. His latest novel, The House of Broken Angels, was a national bestseller and NYTimes Notable Book. Luis has won the Lannan Literary Award, the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize, an American Book Award, the Christopher Award, and an Edgar Award, among other honors. His 2015 collection of short stories, The Water Museum, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won an Academy of Arts and Letters award. His novel Into the Beautiful North is a selection of the NEA’s Big Read program. 

Luis’s books have been selected by more than 100 different cities and colleges for community reads programs and he is much in demand as a speaker, lecturer, and teacher. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, he is most recognized as a border writer, though he says, “I am more interested in bridges, not borders.” He lives outside of Chicago and is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.