Award-winning author Luis Alberto Urrea visited the University of Wyoming Tuesday to discuss his newest book, “The House of Broken Angels.”
Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea is known for his Latino heritage and uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph through all the major genres, with his favorite genre being poetry because it’s the closest to singing.
“Luis Urrea is simply a fascinating writer in many ways,” said Brad Watson, director of UW’s Creative Writing Program. “His work is fun and thrilling to read, great characters, beautiful language. In addition to that, his work has great relevance to some of the most hotly debated and pressing issues of the day: immigration, the border wall, the challenges that face minority citizens figuring out how to live their lives as Americans.”
UW students are no strangers to Urrea’s work, with the MFA and English MA students reading a good amount of his work and the Honor College Colloquium students currently reading “The Devil’s Highway.” Urrea has also visited Laramie many times before and enjoys his time in the American West and seeing old friends.
The best-selling author has won numerous awards for his works. “The Devil’s Highway” won the Lannan Literacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. Urrea’s novel that involved 20 years of research, “The Hummingbird’s Daughter,” won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and was named best book of the year by many publications along with “The Devil’s Highway.” In 2017, “Into the Beautiful North” was adapted into a film production and shown at theaters across the country.
His most recent book, “The House of Broken Angels,” is a story about Miguel Angel de La Cruz (Big Angel) throwing one last legendary birthday party for himself. As the party approaches, his mother dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel’s half-brother Little Angel, who must reckon with the fact he may share a father with his siblings but has not shared a life with them.
Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the clan celebrates the lives of Big Angel and his mother, remembering the tales and acts that brought their family and other citizens like them into the country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home. Urrea’s inspiration for the novel came from the death of his older half-brother five years ago from cancer.
“He [Urrea’s half-brother] really did throw himself a final birthday party and all the family was there,” Urrea said at the talk. “His mother’s funeral really was held the day before the party and I did use my family, my wife’s family, other family gatherings I have attended — probably even your family — as inspiration for many of the characters and experiences.”
Urrea earned his undergraduate degree in writing at the University of California at San Diego and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He then served as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications before moving to Boston, where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard.
He now lives with his family in Naperville, Illinois, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
The event was sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the UW Department of Visual and Literary Arts, with major support from the UW College of Arts and Sciences and Dean Paula Lutz. UW Libraries, the Department of English, the College of Law, the Latina/o Studies Program and the Honors College were co-sponsors of the event.
