The Devil’s Highway
by Luis Alberto Urrea

Little, Brown and Company, USA
ISBN: 0316746711

Urrea tells the riveting but disturbing true story of what happened in May 2001, when a group of 26 Mexican nationals tried illegally to cross into the U.S. through a brutally harsh stretch of desert in southern Arizona known as the Devil's Highway. Only 12 survived the ordeal. In the telling, Urrea criticizes many aspects of United States immigration policy and much on the Mexican side of the border too. He gives voice to the voiceless and much-maligned illegals, as well as to the border patrol officers whose thankless job it is to prevent their crossing over.

Luis Alberto Urrea

Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres. The critically acclaimed author of nine books, he is an award-winning poet and essayist. Urrea's first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book. He also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life. In 2000, he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos. His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was awarded the small-press 2002 Book of the Year Award for Fiction by the editors of  ForeWord magazine, and in 2004 he received the coveted Lannan Award for nonfiction.

Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.     
After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to the Boston area in 1982. There he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College and the University of Colorado, and he was writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.   

Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Visit the author's website at www.luisurrea.com.

(Information about the author and photo from Little, Brown & Co. media release on www.luisurrea.com)