Lannan Foundation

Luís Alberto Urrea, poet, fiction, and nonfiction writer, was born in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1955 and grew up in San Diego. Steeped in personal knowledge of US/Mexico border culture, he is best known for his numerous books and essays where he writes “with a tragic and beautiful intimacy that has no equal.”(Boston Globe) His autobiographical _Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life_ won an American Book Award in 1999, and Across the Wire was a New York Times notable book of the year in 1993. The son of an Anglo-American mother and a Mexican father, he says, "Home isn't just a place, it is also a language."

Luis Alberto Urrea Bio and Cross Links

Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus of English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has served as president of the National Association for Humanities Education and on the Louisiana State Task Force for Literature and Literacy He recently published The Blue Boat in the inaugural issue of special editions of the Center for Louisiana Studies. Of his work he says, "Poems are, for me, declarations negotiated by imagination faithful to language."

Darrell Bourque Bio and Cross Links