Oscar Cásares

Writer-at-large Oscar Cásares is the author of the story collection Brownsville and the novels Amigoland and Where We Come From, which have earned him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Copernicus Society of America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2003, the American Library Association selected Brownsville as a Notable Book of the Year. In 2009, the Mayor’s Book Club of Austin chose Amigoland for its Austin City-Wide Read. And in 2020, the Texas Institute of Letters awarded Where We Come From the Jesse H. Jones Award for the best book of fiction. Cásares’s writing focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border, where he grew up and where his family began to settle in the mid-1800s. Aside from his writing for Texas Monthly, he has published personal essays in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Since 2004, he has taught creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.