Celebrated author Luis Alberto Urrea will deliver the keynote address at URI’s virtual Spring Humanities Festival on April 8, 2021, at 4 p.m. He will speak about “The Humanities in Action: A Writer’s Perspective on the Border.”
Hailed by NPR as a “literary badass” and a “master storyteller with a rock and roll heart,” Urrea is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. An award-winning novelist, poet, short-story and non-fiction writer, he is best known for Into the Beautiful North (a Big Read selection by the National Endowment for the Arts and popular selection for community reads) and Devil’s Highway (for which he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005). Urrea, who was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, is most recognized as a border writer although he says, “I am more interested in bridges, not borders.”