Benjamin Alire Sáenz's first book, Calendar of Dust (1991), won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation in 1992, and a year later he received the prestigious Lannan Poetry Fellowship. He has received many other awards, prizes, and fellowships since he first began writing, among them the Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship in creative writing from Stanford University for two consecutive years, 1988 and 1989. Sáenz writes poetry, essays, short stories, and novels about Chicanos and other peoples of the Southwest and their struggles with the cultural and economic imperialism of the dominant classes. His writing stresses the violence of American society, as well as the determination and spirit of resistance among its disenfranchised people.

Sáenz was born on 16 August 1954 in Old Picacho, a farming community outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. He was the fourth of seven children of Eloisa Chavez Alire and Juan Villanueva...