Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Poetry, Fiction

Catalog Number(s): 20160923, 20131011

Interview Year(s): 2013

Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in New Mexico, but later moved to El Paso, Texas, where he was a priest for a few years before leaving the order. He went on to earn a Masters degree in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. It was there that he formed a complicated fascination for the city of Juárez, Mexico. Inspired by a real-life bar in Juárez, Sáenz’s Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2013, making Sáenz the first Latino writer ever to win the award. In this public reading at the Writers Place in Kansas City, he reads stories from his award-winning collection and poems from a forthcoming book.