Ben Cruz

I was born in Mexico City. My father was a banker, and my mother a psychologist. Growing up, I traveled to the U.S. once or twice a year, always amazed at the contrasts between the two countries, though I didn't yet understand the foundational events that made them seem antithetical and opposite.

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When I was twenty, I drove 1,200 miles from Mexico City to New Orleans to celebrate New Year's with two friends. It was the first time I found myself in a North American city that wasn't so different from home. That experience planted the first seed for this book. Many of the events in the novel couldn’t have taken place anywhere else but here and draw on my first memories of arriving on Bourbon Street.

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Years later, I moved to San Francisco and spent innumerable foggy nights in Pacific Heights and the Marina, plotting a novel that is essentially American and incorporates elements of the literature I grew up reading, like García Márquez and Juan Rulfo.

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Today, I'm married with four children. We live in Seattle, where I work for Amazon and where I studied creative writing at the University of Washigton.