Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz (1954 - 2026) was a poet, priest, educator, and longtime resident of El Paso and traveler to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, winner of the 2013 PEN/Faulkner award, and a collection of stories whose characters are all tied in one way or another to this famed watering hole on Avenida Juárez, of which he wrote, “people go [there] when they’re in trouble, when they’re looking for trouble or when they’re trying to get out of trouble.” A prolific writer and master of many genres, his books include the novel Carry Me Like Water, the young adult book Sammy & Juliana in Hollywood, and the poetry collection Dark and Perfect Angels.

Named one of 2010’s “Fifty of the Most Inspiring Authors in the World” by Poets & Writers magazine, Sáenz studied philosophy and theology and was a Wallace E. Stegner fellow in poetry at Stanford University. He was the recipient of the 1993 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Born in Old Picacho, New Mexico, in 1954, Sáenz joined the faculty at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1992.