El Paso is mourning Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the acclaimed Chicano author whose tender stories about identity, family and belonging reached readers around the world. Sáenz, best known for the young-adult novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, died Tuesday at age 71 after a lengthy illness.
The El Paso Times reported that Sáenz died in El Paso, where he had built a long career as a writer and professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. Born in New Mexico on Aug. 16, 1954, he published more than 25 books across poetry, fiction, memoir and children’s literature.
“Aristotle And Dante” Became His Signature Work
Sáenz’s 2012 novel about two lonely teenagers became his most widely known book, selling more than 1 million copies worldwide, according to the El Paso Times. Set against the emotional and cultural landscape of El Paso, the story follows a friendship that changes how its young protagonists understand love, family and themselves.
A sequel, Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World, followed in 2020. Together, the books gave generations of young readers a nuanced coming-of-age story centered on Mexican American identity and queer self-discovery.
A Borderlands Voice Rooted At UTEP
UTEP’s College of Liberal Arts described Sáenz as a celebrated border writer and retired creative-writing professor in an account of a 2022 homenaje held in his honor. The university said the event brought together fellow authors, poets, former publishers and young admirers whose lives had been touched by his work.
His Literary Honors Extended Far Beyond Young Adult Fiction
In 2013, Sáenz won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, a collection of stories set around El Paso and Juárez. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation described him as an artist, poet, novelist and children’s writer whose work crossed literary boundaries.
The Texas Institute of Letters later selected Sáenz for its Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement, one of the organization’s highest honors. The institute’s award history lists him as the 2021 recipient, recognizing a body of work that made El Paso and the broader borderlands central to contemporary Texas literature.
For El Paso readers, Sáenz’s legacy is likely to feel especially close to home: not simply because he wrote about the region, but because he made its contradictions, tenderness and hard-won sense of belonging impossible to overlook. His work will continue to serve as a literary welcome mat for readers still searching for a place in the story, much as UTEP’s tribute suggested when it celebrated his impact on young people across the LGBTQ community.
