El Paso Matters – Renowned El Paso author, artist Benjamin Alire Sáenz dies at 71

He was a farmboy, a priest, a teacher. He was a poet, novelist and artist.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the renowned El Paso author whose complex life and acclaimed work have been widely recognized, died Tuesday night after a lengthy illness. He was 71.

“What Ben did that nobody else could get away with is be bold enough to be sentimental, to write heartbreaking things that some people might think are too emotional,” said author Daniel Chacón, a friend of Sáenz who serves as chairman of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso. “That’s what he did best.”

Born Aug. 16, 1954, in Old Picacho, New Mexico, a small farming community near Las Cruces, Sáenz became one of the Borderland’s most revered authors – drawing from his life to pen his works. 

“It is my stubborn heart that’s made me the writer that I have become. There was no Plan B. I was going to become a writer,” Sáenz said in a TEDx Talk in El Paso in 2023.  

He was the fourth of seven children, and often spoke about growing up poor, about never feeling like he fit in, and always turning to books to cope with – or often escape – his feelings.

“I am a living, functioning paradox. I have always known who I was, yet there were many moments when I was a stranger unto myself,” he said in his TEDx Talk.

Sáenz graduated from Las Cruces High School in 1972, and that fall entered the St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, where he received a bachelor’s in humanities and philosophy. He studied theology at the University of Louvain in Belgium.

He entered the Catholic priesthood, serving in El Paso for three years before leaving his order.

“Ben was irrepressibly hopeful of the human spirit,” said Ruben Garcia, founder of the Annunciation House network of migrant shelters in El Paso, who was friends with Sáenz for about 55 years. They met through the Catholic Diocese. “That was non-negotiable for him – the human spirit – and he was incredibly protective about that.”

Garcia called Sáenz an “incredible, faithful friend” who was always the first to lend a hand – or a car. In 1984, Garcia recalled, Sáenz offered him his car to drive across Central America to see firsthand why migrants were leaving their home countries and coming to the United States.

“It wasn’t just cross country,” Garcia said about the trip in Sáenz’s old Nissan. “It was across the country of Mexico, the country of Guatemala, the country of El Salvador, the country of Honduras and then Nicaragua.”

After leaving the priesthood, Sáenz returned to school, earning a master’s in creative writing from UTEP in 1987. He joined the faculty at the university, teaching creative writing and serving as chair of the department while publishing poetry and fiction. He retired from the university in 2016.

In the early 1990s, Sáenz married Patricia Macias. After more than a decade, they divorced, with Saenz coming out as gay following years of addiction battling drinking and dabbling in drugs, he told El Paso Inc. Magazine in 2021.

“I don’t know if I feared it, or was ashamed of it or just didn’t acknowledge it,” he told the magazine about his struggles with accepting his identity. “I had to come to terms with it.”

His writing blossomed in the 1990s, publishing his debut poetry collection, “Calendar of Dust,” which won an American Book Award; “Carry Me Like Water,” a novel about class, family and healing that won the Southwest Book Award; and “The House of Forgetting,” a novel examining family secrets, trauma and identity.

Sáenz also authored many children’s books, including “The Dog Who Loved Tortillas,” and “A Gift From Papa Diego,” and in 2006, Cinco Puntos Press of El Paso published his young adult novel, “Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood.”  

His two most prominent books were published in 2012.

“Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe,” a young adult novel set in El Paso in the 1980s, centers on two Mexican-American teenage boys who become friends and fall in love. 

His collection of short stories, “Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club,” is set in El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and the bar at the foot of the international bridge that connects the two cities.

Chacón, who hosted the literary radio show “Words on a Wire” on KTEP with Sáenz from about 2011 to 2014, said he recalls that a review of the “Kentucky Club” called the book “too sentimental.” But moreso, he recalls Sáenz saying that’s where the connection with readers lies.

“If you’re writing and it doesn’t hurt, it’s probably not worth much,” Chacón recalled Sáenz saying. “He was going for the jugular, he was going for the pain.”

In 2013, Sáenz won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for “Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club,” becoming the first Latino and only the second gay writer to earn the honor. The book, published by Cinco Puntos Press, won a Lambda Literary Award and a Stonewall Honor.

Lee and Bobby Byrd, who founded Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso in 1985, gravitated to Latino authors such as Sáenz and Dagoberto Gilb.

“Latino writers were not at a premium. Nobody really was publishing them, and so Bobby and I, inadvertently, without really knowing what we were doing, were publishing people we really liked,” Lee Byrd said. “And then they began to take off, and the bigger houses began to want them to publish with them.”

Byrd said her relationship with Saenz had its difficulties – because of his addiction issues, and because he moved on to publishing with Simon and Schuster when Cinco Puntos Press wasn’t large enough to get his work to a mass audience.  

Byrd visited Saenz at Sierra Medical Center  on Monday.

“He did just say to me right now, ‘I think I’ve written my last book, and I don’t think it matters anymore.’ And that’s kind of how I feel,” she said.

The Texas Institute of Letters honored Sáenz with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. 

El Paso-born author Sergio Troncoso, who served as president of the Texas Institute of Letters at that time, said Saenz is “someone whose life should be understood in all of its complexity, and it should be treasured and read and reread and discussed.”

“I think Ben was a fronterizo. I think that’s what he would call himself, a man of the border, a man who lived through many borders,” said Troncoso, who now lives in New York City. 

Chris Barton, a children’s book author and current president of the Texas Institute of Letters, said Sáenz is “one of (Texas’) most significant writers.”

“In 2009, TIL inducted a poet, a children’s book author, a terrific author of fiction, and a mentor and teacher to a lot of Texas writers. And that was all one person,” Barton said of Sáenz. 

He acknowledged that Sáenz’s induction into TIL – an invitation-only organization that honors writers, journalists, and others who have made significant contributions to Texas letters – was long overdue. 

“Whether for reasons of geography or for reasons of bigotry, he did not receive the recognition from TIL that he should have received much earlier than he did, and that’s on us. That’s something for us to continue shaping our work,” Barton said.

In 2021, Sáenz published “Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World,” a sequel to the 2012 novel. The sequel reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Sellers young adult novels list. 

The first “Aristotle and Dante” novel was adapted into an independent film of the same name in 2023.

“The movie, like the book, is a love story,” he told El Paso Matters ahead of the film’s release that year. “But it’s not just Ari discovering he loves Dante. It’s Ari discovering that he loves his parents – and that he loves himself, too.”

READ MORE: ‘It’s a wonderful movie,’ El Paso author Ben Sáenz says of ‘Aristotle and Dante’ film adaptation of his novel

The first “Aristotle and Dante” book was named among Time Magazine’s 100 Best Young Adult Novels of All Time in 2021. The audiobook version of the sequel, voiced by songwriter and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, in 2022 was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Audio Book, Narration and Storytelling Recording category.

Throughout the years, Sáenz also had a passion for painting, telling El Paso Inc. Magazine that it provided him another creative outlet – especially when words weren’t enough. He opened a small gallery, Studio 1921, in Downtown El Paso last summer that has since closed.

But he never stopped writing.

At Sáenz’s hospital bed was a box filled with copies of one of his latest works, Garcia said, calling it yet another example of his friend’s spirit.

“When the World Was Happy,” about teenage twin sisters who have to rebuild their lives after a school shooting in El Paso, is set to be released Sept. 29 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

“This book is about what remains after everything changes,” Sáenz wrote on Instagram in February. “I hope it finds the people who need it.”

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Memorial fund established: The El Paso Community Foundation has established the Benjamin Alire Sáenz Literary Fund at his request, to establish a book festival in El Paso and support authors in the region. Click here to donate.

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Sáenz also has a children’s book being released Sept. 29, “Grandma Fina’s Wonderful Umbrella,” published by HarperCollins. It is illustrated by Raúl the Third, with color by Elaine Bay – both from El Paso.

Raúl said he received a call from Anne Hoppe, an executive at HarperCollins, asking if he’d be interested in illustrating a children’s book by Sáenz. The book had been previously published by Cinco Puntos Press, with illustrations by Geronimo Garcia.

“I said, ‘I absolutely need to illustrate this book.’ Ben was actually the very first author I ever heard speak,” said Raúl, whose given name is Raúl González.

Raúl, now 49 and living in Boston, was a high school dropout more than 30 years ago, with aspirations of becoming an artist. His father told him that he should go hear from an actual artist, Sáenz, who was speaking at the Barnes and Noble on Sunland Park Drive. 

He said he resisted, but his father eventually “guilted” him into going. The event changed Raúl’s life.

“I was immediately inspired by his presentation, by the way he spoke of the characters he had created, and everything that went into the making of this novel,” Raúl said.

“He was writing about where we lived, and that to me was something that I hadn’t really ever tried to do in my work. And now I’ve spent the past like 20, 25 years of my career basically creating books and works of art that are inspired by my border experience,” he said.

Along with the lifelong friends he often praised and thanked – as well as his Yorkshire Terriers Chuy and Rain – Sáenz loved El Paso. 

His TEDx Talk, titled “I lost myself and found myself in the city that I love,” centered on identity, belonging and place. 

In El Paso, he said, he found he belonged. 

“I was always looking for a road that would take me to a place where I could rest from the chronic disquiet that raced incisively from my head to my heart and back again,” Sáenz said in his talk. When he was honored for his work, he said, El Paso was also honored.

Susie Byrd, whose parents published numerous Sáenz books at Cinco Puntos Press, said El Paso was the primary character in his work.

“He just loves this place so much, and that’s so present in everything he writes about. He loves the people, he loves the geography, he loves the complexity, and he wants everybody else to love it,” she said. “And he’s determined to make you see what’s beautiful and important about this place.”

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