Your browser is unsupported

We recommend using the latest version of IE11, Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

Luis Alberto Urrea

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences  |  English

Luis Alberto Urrea, a Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of 18 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. His latest novel, Good Night Irene, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is based on his mother’s service as a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” serving troops on the frontlines of the European theater in WWII. The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His novel, The House of Broken Angels, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award in 2017 for his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North is a Big Read selection of the National Endowment of the Arts. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea

Book Cover: New York Times Bestseller

Good Night, Irene

Little, Brown

An exhilarating World War II epic that chronicles an extraordinary young woman’s heroic frontline service in the Red Cross, as inspired by Urrea’s mother’s Red Cross Service.