Beloved author Benjamin Alire Sáenz, first Latino PEN/Faulkner winner, dies at 71

NEW YORK (AP) — Benjamin Alire Sáenz, an award-winning fiction writer and poet who drew upon his sexuality and his life on the Southern border, has died at age 71. He was the first Latino to win the PEN/Faulkner prize.

Sáenz, who produced a story collection that won the PEN/Faulkner prize and a young adult novel that received acclaim from readers and reviewers and condemnation from censors, died last week in El Paso, Texas after a lengthy illness, according to a spokesperson for Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing. Additional details were not immediately available.

Sáenz, born in Old Picacho, New Mexico, was an ordained Catholic priest who eventually left the order and came out as gay. His “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe,” the story of two Mexican American boys falling in love, was published in 2012 and received a pair of citations for outstanding LGBTQ+ literature: a Stonewall Honors Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

“Hamilton” playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, who narrated the audio edition and helped produce a 2023 film adaptation, wrote in an Instagram post that he was “heartbroken” over Sáenz’s death.

“Rest easy, maestro,” Miranda wrote. The movie starred Max Pelayo and Reese Gonzales as the title characters and also featured Eva Longoria.

The novel’s love story led to its being removed temporarily from a school district in Granbury, Texas, and to bans in Russia and in Belarus.

Saenz’s other books included the sequel “Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World,” the poetry collection “The Book of What Remains” and such adult novels as “In Perfect Light” and “Names on a Map.”

He received the PEN/Faulkner award in 2013 for “Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club,” a story collection set in El Paso, and across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Starting in the 1990s, he taught for decades at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he had received a master’s degree in creative writing. He served as chair of the school’s creative writing department before retiring in 2016.

Next month, Simon & Schuster will publish “When the World Was Happy,” which draws in part upon the loss of his niece in 1990 in a Las Cruces, New Mexico, bowling alley shooting. He was reminded of that tragedy by the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“That was when I decided that this was not gonna leave me alone until I wrote about it,” he wrote in an author’s note shared by the publisher. “I wanted to write a book about how people survive and live through something as senseless as this.”