Luis Alberto Urrea (born August 20, 1955 in Tijuana, Mexico)[1] is a Mexican-American poet, novelist, and essayist.

[2] After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana, he worked as a teachers aide in the Chicano Studies department in San Diego's Mesa College in 1978.

His mother died in 1990, bringing Urrea back to California to settle her affairs, and parts of Across the Wire were published in the San Diego Reader.

[11] Mythili G. Rao of the New York Times compares both of Urrea's heavily researched novels in an article titled "The Most Dangerous Girl in Mexico goes to America"; Rao writes, "Where The Hummingbird's Daughter was driven by an otherworldly mysticism and the call of fate, its sequel is largely occupied with the ordinary troubles of mortal life".

Like a vast mural, the book displays a huge cast of workers, whores, cowboys, rich men, bandits and saints while simultaneously making them seem to float on the page".

[13] Joanne Omang, from the Washington Post writes, "The Hummingbird's Daughter is paced beautifully, inexorable and slow-seeming as life itself.

[14] Luis Alberto Urrea is also admired by Sandra Dijkstra of Publishers Weekly; she writes, "His brilliant prose is saturated with the cadences and insights of Latin-American magical realism and tempered by his exacting reporter's eye and extensive historical investigation".

[15] The House of Broken Angels, his novel published in March 2018, is based in part on the death of the author's eldest brother, his half-brother raised in Mexico.

"[16] Michael Upchurch in the Chicago Tribune remarked the wonderful turns of phrase in the novel about a family sprawling across the US-Mexico border and the sense of place, "You couldn't ask for a more vivid sense of place either, whether you're talking physical surroundings ("The funeral home had a fake Germanic facade and stood across the street from a taco shop, a gas station and a Starbucks") or the way people think and speak.