I come from a town called Brownsville, located at the southern end of the Texas-Mexico border, just across the bridge from Matamoros. Originally from San Luis Potosí, Nuevo León, my ancestors settled in this region back in the 1850s, and since then we have spread far and wide across the country. Still, as it is for many us, regardless of where we come from, home remains home.

I write novels, stories, and essays about the border. My first book was a story collection called Brownsville, which was named a Notable Book of 2004 by the American Library Association and today is part of the curriculum in high schools, colleges, and universities. Amigoland, my first novel, was selected for the 2009 Austin Mayor’s Book Club, a citywide reading initiative by the Austin Public Library. My latest novel, Where We Come From, is about a lot of things—too many to list here—but what I can tell you is that I wrote it to understand what happens when you are separated from a place or a person but a piece of that place or person never leaves you.

Although I learned most of what I know about storytelling from my tío Nico and tío Hector, I’m also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Over the years, my writing has earned me fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Institute of Letters (Dobie Paisano), the San Ysidro Writer’s Residency, the Copernicus Society of America, and the New England Foundation for the Arts. My nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and Texas Monthly, where “Postcards from the Border” first appeared as an essay before becoming a theater performance. 

Since 2004, I’ve been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where I direct the New Writers Project, one of UT-Austin’s two MFA programs in creative writing. With deep roots in Rio Grande Valley, I now live in Austin with my wife, Becky, and our kids, Adrian and Elena.