Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the award-winning fiction writer and poet who became the first Latino to win the PEN/Faulkner prize, died on 28 July 2026 in El Paso, Texas, after a lengthy illness. He was 71. A spokesperson for Simon & Schuster confirmed his death The Guardian.

Born in Old Picacho, New Mexico, in 1954, Sáenz led a life of layered identities long before they surfaced in his fiction. He was ordained as a Catholic priest before eventually leaving the order and coming out as gay. That trajectory, from the seminary to one of the most celebrated voices in queer Chicano literature, shaped a body of work notable for its intimacy, borderland settings, and spiritual restlessness. Chicano literature refers to writing by Mexican Americans that explores the cultural and political experiences of that community.

Sáenz's most widely recognized novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, was published in 2012. It received both a Stonewall Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award, two of the most prominent honors for LGBTQ+ literature. The novel, a coming-of-age story about two Mexican American boys, became a defining text in young adult LGBTQ+ literature and was adapted into a 2023 film directed by Aitch Alberto. Lin-Manuel Miranda narrated the audio edition, helped produce the film adaptation, and narrated the audiobook of the sequel, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World.

The novel's reach also made it a recurring target of censorship. Aristotle and Dante was temporarily removed from a school district in Granbury, Texas, and banned outright in Russia and Belarus. Its presence on both award shortlists and challenged-book lists captures a tension that ran through much of Sáenz's career: his work was embraced by literary institutions and simultaneously contested by the political and cultural forces surrounding them.

In 2013, Sáenz won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for the story collection Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, making him the first Latino writer to receive the honor. The PEN/Faulkner Award is one of the most prestigious fiction prizes in the United States. The collection comprises seven stories set along the south Texas border in El Paso, a city central to both his fiction and his daily life. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation described the collection's setting as the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez border region PEN/Faulkner.

Sáenz received a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and began teaching there in the 1990s. He served as chair of the creative writing department before retiring in 2016, ending a teaching career that spanned decades and shaped a generation of writers in the Borderlands.

His other published works include the poetry collection The Book of What Remains and the adult novels In Perfect Light and Names on a Map. Across these works, Sáenz consistently returned to the geographies and emotional landscapes of the U.S.-Mexico border, exploring themes of identity, loss, faith, and belonging with a lyrical precision that drew readers across age groups and genres.

Simon & Schuster is set to publish Sáenz's book When the World Was Happy next month. The work draws in part on the loss of his niece, who was killed in a 1990 bowling alley shooting in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Sáenz had said that the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, reminded him of his niece's death and prompted him to write about the tragedy. The forthcoming book will be the final entry in a bibliography that, at its core, was never far from the borderlands where Sáenz lived, wrote, and taught for most of his life.

The broader context here is that Sáenz occupied a rare position in American letters: a writer whose work bridged young adult and literary fiction, queer and Chicano storytelling, and academic and popular readerships. That his most famous novel was simultaneously award-winning and banned speaks to how contested the terrain of identity, sexuality, and youth literature has become in the United States and beyond. His final book, arriving posthumously, turns to yet another difficult subject — gun violence — suggesting that even at the end of his career, Sáenz was drawn to the wounds that shape communities along the border and across the country.