Luis Alberto Urrea
“I always tell my students that laughter is the virus that infects you with humanity. And if you sit with somebody and laugh — not at them, but laugh with them wholeheartedly — you’re going to cry with them, too. That laughter is a very dangerous portal for humanity.”
Luis Alberto Urrea is the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 19 books, including the novels The House of Broken Angels (2018), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and Into the Beautiful North (2009), a Big Read Selection by the National Endowment for the Arts that has been selected as a Community Read by more than 50 different cities and colleges, and the narrative nonfiction book The Devil’s Highway (2004), an account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, which won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize.
In 2017, Luis won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award and his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN-Faulkner Award. The Hummingbird’s Daughter, his 2005 historical novel, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and, along with The Devil’s Highway, was named a best book of the year by many publications. In all, more than 100 cities and colleges have chosen Into the Beautiful North, The Devil’s Highway or The Hummingbird’s Daughter for a community read.
Luis’s newest book, Good Night, Irene, takes as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross service. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates that Urrea’s “gifts as a storyteller are prodigious” (NPR).
