Photo by: Vantage Point Visual Studios, inc. ©2005

Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1954. He studied at the University of Louvain in Belgium from 1977 to 1981. He is a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University where he also spent two years in the English Department as a Ph.D. student. His first book of poems, Calendar of Dust, won an American Book Award in 1992. That same year, he published his first collection of short stories, Flowers for the Broken. In 1993, he was awarded a poetry fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. In 1995, he published his first novel, Carry Me Like Water (Hyperion), and that same year, he published his second book of poems, Dark and Perfect Angels. Both books were awarded a Southwest Book Award by the Border Area Librarians Association. In 1997, HarperCollins published his second novel, The House of Forgetting.

His third book of poems, Elegies in Blue, was published in the spring of 2002, a fourth book of poetry entitled, Dreaming the End of War is due out in the spring of 2006 from Copper Canyon Press. His third novel (for young adults), Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood was published by Cinco Puntos Press in 2004 and was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Young Adult Fiction. His fourth novel, In Perfect Light, will be published by Rayo/HarperCollins in the summer of 2005. In Perfect Light will appear simultaneously in a Spanish language translation. In addition, Rayo/HarperCollins will soon be re-issuing a new edition of Carry Me Like Water.

Mr. Sáenz has also authored two very successful bi-lingual children’s books, A Gift from Papa Diego and Grandma Fina and Her Wonderful Umbrellas which was awarded the best children’s book of 1999 by The Texas Institute of Letters. He is currently at work on his third children’s book, Octavio Rivera’s Fantastic Dreams of Summer.

Sáenz is also a visual artist and has been involved both as a political and cultural activist in El Paso, Texas. He is an associate professor in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso, the only bilingual creative writing program in the country. He is married to the Honorable Patricia Macias, Judge of the 388th District Family Court.