Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz (born 16 August 1954) is an award-winning American poet, novelist and writer of young adult and children's literature.

He was born at Old Picacho, New Mexico, the fourth of seven children, and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla, New Mexico. He graduated from Las Cruces High School in 1972. That fall, he entered St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado where he received a B.A. degree in Humanities and Philosophy in 1977. He studied Theology at the University of Louvain in Leuven, Belgium from 1977 to 1981. He was a priest for a few years in El Paso, Texas before leaving the order.

In 1985, he returned to school, and studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso where he earned an M.A. degree in Creative Writing. He then spent a year at the University of Iowa as a PhD student in American Literature. A year later, he was awarded a Wallace E. Stegner fellowship. While at Stanford University under the guidance of Denise Levertov, he completed his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust, which won an American Book Award in 1992. He entered the Ph.D. program at Stanford and continued his studies for two more years. Before completing his Ph.D., he moved back to the border and began teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso in the bilingual MFA program.

Today, he teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas in El Paso.

His works (In no particular):

The Carry Me Like Water Saga

The Book of What Remains

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

Last Night I Sang to the Monster

Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

Names on a Map

Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

In the Perfect Light

He Forgot to Say Goodbye 

The House of Forgetting

Dreaming of the End of the War 

Elegies in Blue 

A Perfect Season for Dreaming (Illustrated by Esau Valencia)

The Dog who Loved Tortillas (Illustrated by Geronimo Garcia)

A Gift from Papa Diego (Illustrated by Geronimo Garcia)

The Last Cigarette on Earth 

Calendar of Dust 

Flowers for the Broken

Dark and Perfect Angels

Grandma Fina and her Wonderful Umbrellas (Illustrated by Geronimo Garcia) (Translated by Pilar Herrera)

Finding Your Literary Voice

L'uomo delle regole (Translated by Lucas Briasco)

Native: A Novel (Benjamin only wrote the intro, the rest is by an author named William Haywood Henderson)

The Late Great Mexican Border: Reports from a Disappearing Line (one of many contributors)

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (of course)