The Las Cruces-born poet and novelist wrote across genres, refused easy definitions and encouraged younger writers to trust their own voices

Damien Willis, Organ Mountain News

LAS CRUCES - Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the Las Cruces-born poet and novelist whose stories of identity, family and life along the U.S.-Mexico border earned some of American literature’s highest honors, died Tuesday after a long illness. He was 71.

Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers confirmed Sáenz’s death Wednesday. His final novel, When the World Was Happy, is scheduled for publication Sept. 29.

Sáenz wrote poetry, adult fiction, children’s books and young adult novels, never allowing himself or his work to be confined to a single genre or identity.

Ben played by his own rules, but never carelessly. He was strong, thoughtful and deeply sincere. He refused to let other people define the limits of his life or his work.

He was also kind and generous to younger writers, including this one.

For all his stature, Ben never made younger writers feel small. He encouraged without condescension. He listened sincerely and treated another writer’s work and ambitions as though they mattered.

I was one of the writers who benefited from that kindness.

Years ago, Ben reached out and asked me to lunch while he was living in Las Cruces. During our conversation, he mentioned that his 13-year-old niece, Amy Hauser, had been killed in the 1990 Las Cruces bowling alley massacre.

I had not known.

Ben told me that he had been living in California as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford when Amy was killed. After returning from her funeral, he walked into a store at Stanford Shopping Center and bought her a shirt.

Only after stepping outside did he remember that Amy was gone.

The story stayed with me. It captured the disorienting cruelty of grief — the way love can continue carrying out its ordinary rituals for a moment before loss catches up.

Struck by the story’s emotional and literary weight, I asked whether he had ever considered writing about it.

“I can’t,” he told me. “Not yet.”

More than two decades had passed, but the pain was still too large to put on the page.

Years later, the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, helped unlock that door. In a final author’s note published Wednesday by People with permission from Simon & Schuster, Sáenz wrote that the Uvalde massacre returned him to his family’s trauma and compelled him to confront the story he had carried for decades.

His final novel grew from the loss he had not yet been able to face in his work that day.

When the World Was Happy follows teenage twins CheChe and Emma and their circle of friends after a school shooting overturns their lives. The novel explores grief, survival, friendship and the difficult work of creating a life after violence.

For Sáenz, writing the book became an act of remembrance for Amy and an expression of solidarity with families whose children have been killed by gun violence.

Sáenz was born and raised in the Mesilla Valley and graduated from Las Cruces High School before leaving southern New Mexico to study for the priesthood.

He studied humanities and philosophy at St. Thomas Seminary in Denver and theology at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He served as a priest in El Paso before leaving the priesthood and returning to school to study creative writing.

He earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and later became a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he completed his first poetry collection, Calendar of Dust.

The collection received an American Book Award.

Sáenz returned to the borderlands and taught creative writing at UTEP for more than two decades, becoming a central figure in the literary community stretching from Las Cruces to El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

His career crossed forms and audiences. He wrote poetry, novels, short stories and books for children and teenagers, moving among them without allowing the publishing world to paint him into a corner.

His 2012 story collection, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, won the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Its seven stories, connected to the famed Juárez bar, explored lives shaped by geography, politics, violence and personal history along the El Paso-Juárez border.

Sáenz found perhaps his broadest readership through young adult fiction.

His 2012 novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, told the story of two Mexican American boys in 1980s El Paso discovering friendship, love and themselves.

The novel received a Michael L. Printz Honor, the Stonewall Book Award, the Pura Belpré Award and a Lambda Literary Award. It later became a feature film and was followed by the sequel Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World.

The success of Aristotle and Dante introduced Sáenz to generations of younger readers and gave his career a remarkable new chapter.

But reinvention was never merely a professional strategy for Ben. He lived deliberately. He made difficult choices on his own terms and continued moving toward the life and work that felt most honest.

He also made room for others.

At a 2022 tribute marking his retirement from UTEP, colleagues, former students and fellow writers celebrated Sáenz’s influence on the borderlands literary community. The university presented him with its inaugural Ruben Salazar Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Human Spirit.

The honors tell part of the story.

The books tell more.

But neither fully captures what it meant to be a younger writer receiving Ben’s encouragement — the sense that he was not merely being polite, that he genuinely believed another voice deserved space in the world.

I had hoped to make it to El Paso to see him one more time.

I thought there would be time.

There wasn’t.

But there are the books. There is the generosity he extended to writers still finding their footing. There is the shirt he bought for Amy before grief caught up with him. And there is the story he once could not bear to tell, but finally found the strength to finish.

There are also all the writers and readers Benjamin Alire Sáenz made feel less alone.

Damien Willis is founder and editor of Organ Mountain News. If you have a personal story to share or a lead we should follow up on, reach out at OrganMountainNews@gmail.com or connect with him on X at @damienwillis.