Spotlight image: Author Benjamin Alire Sáenz at the Texas Book Festival in 2009, from the Cynsations archives.
Author and poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz died July 28 in El Paso. He was 71, reported Shannon Maughan for Publishers Weekly.
He has two books out this fall. The first is a picture book, Grandma Fina’s Wonderful Umbrella, illustrated by Raúl the Third and Elaine Bay (Allida/HarperCollins, 2026).
Both illustrators are also from El Paso, and Raúl the Third credits Sáenz for a critical moment in his creative life when he was age 20 and his dad insisted he attend an author event at Barnes & Noble.
“…I was immediately inspired by his presentation, by the way he spoke of the characters he had created… He was writing about where we lived, and that was something that I had never tried—or even thought to do—in my own work,” he told Publishers Weekly. He went on. “Ben was our hero. He was a mythical father figure who had made it… Seeing our towns and people in his work showed me that we deserved to have our stories told.”
Sáenz’ other book is a young adult novel, When the World Was Happy (Simon & Schuster, 2026). From the publisher website:
CheChe knows that he and his twin sister Emma lead an unusual life. They enjoy spending time with their parents and grandparents, love to read, and don’t have a huge circle of friends—and they’re happy. Then, just a few months after they turn seventeen, three gunmen show up one morning at their El Paso, Texas, high school, and everything changes.
CheChe loses a leg, and both he and Emma have friends who die. Suddenly, the world feels like a very different place. But what they find hasn’t changed—or has only gotten deeper—is their love for their family, their close friends, and one another, and as they begin to heal, they create their own little community, one that wields the power of humor, kindness, and hope.
CheChe finds himself doing all kinds of things he never expected from his junior year: relearning to walk, falling in love with the boy he’s nursed a longtime crush on, making friends with a kid he always found intimidating. By the end of this life-changing school year, none of them will be the same, and many of them will have found their voices in ways they never imagined.
In a May 2026 interview with Joanne O’Sullivan for Publishers Weekly, Sáenz’ discussed his personal connection to the story: the fatal shooting of his 13-year-old niece Amy and three other people in a bowling alley, and his belief in the power of stories.
“Fiction is safe. The world around young people is not. Whatever the novel is about, it’s just a novel, and that creates a distance—but at the same time, reading is an incredibly intimate experience…reading contemporary novels does indeed touch young adults, and it sometimes helps create change in them.”
Sáenz’s most widely known YA work is Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2012), winner of the Pura Belpre Award, a LAMBDA Literary Award, and a Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book. The book was produced as a motion picture in 2023. A sequel, Aristotle and Dante Dive in the Waters of the World, was published in 2021.
Sáenz held a BA in humanities and philosophy, a master’s in theology, an MA in creative writing and spent a year at the University of Iowa working on a PhD in American literature. He was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he wrote first book of poetry, Calendar of Dust (Broken Moon Press, 1991), which won the American Book Award. He taught in the University of Texas at El Paso’s MFA program from 1992 to 2016. He published more poetry and two adult novels before embracing children’s literature in addition to writing for adults.
He published bilingual picture books with El Paso-based Cinco Puntos Press, an imprint of Lee & Low since 2021. Those titles include A Gift from Papa Diego/Un regalo de Papá Diego (1998/2022), A Perfect Season for Dreaming/Un tiempo perfecto para soñar (1999/2022), and The Dog Who Loved Tortillas / La perrita que le encantaban las tortillas (2009), all illustrated by Geronimo Garcia, as well as the young adult novels Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (2004) and Last Night I Sang to the Monster. (2009).
Cynsational Notes
Gayleen Rabakukk holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and recently completed a Master’s in Library Science at the University of North Texas. She also has an undergraduate degree in Journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma. She has published numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and two regional interest books for adults. She is represented by Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management.
She’s a librarian at the Lago Vista Public Library, where she leads a book club for young readers. She also teaches creative writing workshops and loves inspiring curiosity in young readers through stories of hope and adventure. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.