A Conversation with American Book Award Winner Reyna Grande

Experience the Episode

Presented by Institute for Latino Studies

Tuesday, January 14, 2025 12:00 pm

Listen in on an oral history conversation with poet and American Book Award recipient Reyna Grande, interviewed by Ae Hee Lee ’17 MFA, as part of the Letras Latinas Oral History Project. Discover Grande’s artistic journey to traverse The Distance Between Us she wrote about in her memoir of the same name. A poet, memoirist, and novelist, Reyna discusses how fairy tales helped her understand the difficult choices her father faced in her young life, how building community is foundational to the success of Latina writers, and the ways writing about her life has helped her find a home within herself no matter where she is in the world.

This conversation was recorded in November 2014. For more information, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

Meet the Poet: Reyna Grande

Reyna Grande is the author of the bestselling memoirs, The Distance Between Us (Atria, 2012) and A Dream Called Home (Atria, 2018), where she writes about her life before and after she arrived in the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child immigrant. 

Her other works include the novels, Across a Hundred Mountains (Atria, 2006), Dancing with Butterflies (Washington Square Press, 2009), and A Ballad of Love and Glory (Atria, 2022), a novel set during the Mexican-American War.  The Distance Between Us is also available as a young reader’s edition from Simon & Schuster’s Children’s Division, Aladdin. She is the co-editor of an anthology by and about undocumented Americans called Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival and New Beginnings (HarperVia, 2022). Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges, and cities across the country. 

Reyna has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award. She was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards. She was honored with a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature, a Latino Spirit Award, and a Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. The young reader’s version of The Distance Between Us received an International Literacy Association Children’s Book Award.

Writing about immigration, family separation, language trauma, the price of the American Dream, and her writing journey, Reyna’s work has appeared in The New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, CNN, The Lily at The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, among others. In March 2020, she was a guest on Oprah’s Book Club television special. 

Reyna is a proud member of the Macondo Writer’s Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros, where she has also served as faculty. She has also taught at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, VONA (Voices of Our Nation’s Arts), Under the Volcano Writer’s Conference, and Grubstreet’s The Muse and the Marketplace, among others. 

Born in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, Reyna was two years old when her father left for the U.S. to find work. Her mother followed her father north two years later, leaving Reyna and her siblings behind in Mexico. In 1985, when Reyna was nine, she left Iguala to make her own journey north.

Reyna attended Pasadena City College before transferring to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she went on to become the first in her family to graduate from university. She holds a BA and an MFA in creative writing.

Meet the Poet: Ae Hee Lee '17 MFA

Ae Hee Lee ‘17 MFA was the recipient of the 2022 Dorset Prize. Poetry judge John Murillo selected Lee’s manuscript Aesterism as the winner. She received a $3,000 cash prize and a week-long residency at MASS MoCA worth $1,500 in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 20 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and national distribution of her book.

In September 2022, the Poetry Foundation also selected Lee as one of 12 finalists for the 2022 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

Born in South Korea, raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee currently lives in the United States. She holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017), Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021), and Connotary, which was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming at Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Southern Review, among others.