Border Heritage Center: Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz (born August 16, 1954) is an award-winning American poet, novelist, writer of children's books and artist. He lives and works in El Paso, Texas.

He was born at Old Picacho, New Mexico, the fourth of seven children, and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla, New Mexico. He graduated from Las Cruces High School in 1972. That fall, he entered St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado where he received a B.A. degree in Humanities and Philosophy in 1977. He studied Theology at the University of Louvain in Leuven, Belgium from 1977 to 1981. He was a priest for a few years in El Paso, Texas before leaving the order.

In 1985, he returned to school, and studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso where he earned an M.A. degree in Creative Writing. He then spent a year at the University of Iowa as a PhD student in American Literature. A year later, he was awarded a Wallace E. Stegner fellowship. While at Stanford University under the guidance of Denise Levertov, he completed his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust, which won an American Book Award in 1992. He entered the Ph.D. program at Stanford and continued his studies for two more years. Before completing his Ph.D., he moved back to the border and began teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso in the bilingual MFA program which he retired from in 2022. It was announced that Wittliff Collections acquired his complete archive.

In 2005, he curated a show of photographs by Julian Cardona.

In The Book of What Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), his fifth book of poems, he writes to the core truth of life's ever-shifting memories. Set along the Mexican border, the contrast between the desert's austere beauty and the brutality of border politics mirrors humanity's capacity for both generosity and cruelty.

In 2010, he and Daniel Chacón began hosting a local literary radio show, Words on a Wire, out of El Paso, Texas that quickly became one of the most important radio programs and podcasts about writers and books in North America. You can hear these and other shows on KTEP.

Sáenz has been awarded the Lambda Literary Award and Stonewall Book Award and has talked about growing up and self expression in various ways. His book Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe has been widely regarded and accepted as a seminal young adult novel in the queer literary canon and has received a movie adaptation.

https://www.latinousa.org/2022/01/21/benjaminaliresaenz/

In 2022 Sáenz had an interview at Townsend Harris High School Library for a LGBTQ+ author talk hosted by the NYC Department of Education. He delved into how the need to label oneself, such as with gender and sexuality, can be limiting and detrimental. He chooses to not label himself as “queer” because for him that word still contains all of the negative meaning it had in his youth. However, if others are comfortable with that label for themselves, that is also completely acceptable, he said. He went on to say that while one may feel tempted to draw lines to help understand who one is, beyond that, they are nothing but limiting and that, “Young people need books that tell them there is still love in the world.”

Sáenz believes in the power of telling LGBTQ+ stories and sharing them with youth. Writing should be about what’s possible, including queer tragedy and queer joy. In that setting, the stories Sáenz writes are a sort of hopeful realism.

https://www.npr.org/2013/02/20/172495550/discovering-sexuality-through-teen-lit

My Story: Benjamin Alire Sáenz on finding his true self

“You find yourself in writing a book.”

On April 8, 2023 he gave a TEDxElPaso talk about how the border shaped his identity and creative journey. Length 17:59