Benjamin Alire Saenz

I studied at St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado where I received a B.A. degree in Humanities and Philosophy in 1977. I studied Theology at the University of Louvain in Leuven, Belgium from 1977 to 1981. I was a priest for a few years in El Paso, Texas before leaving the order.In 1985, I returned to school, and studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso where he earned an M.A. degree in Creative Writing. I then spent a year at the University of Iowa as a PhD student in American Literature. A year later, I was awarded a Wallace E. Stegner fellowship. While at Stanford University under the guidance of Denise Levertov where I completed his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust, which won an American Book Award in 1992. I entered the Ph.D. program at Stanford and continued my studies for two more years. Before completing my Ph.D., I moved back to the border and began teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso in the bilingual MFA program.