Francisco Cantu

Francisco Cantú is an American writer, translator, and former U.S. Border Patrol agent (2008-2012), best known for his memoir The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, which won the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. He has also received a Whiting Award, Pushcart Prize, Art for Justice fellowship, and Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano Literature, with his essays and translations appearing in The New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Essays. A lifelong Southwest resident raised by a Mexican immigrant mother, he now teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.