About the Author
Reyna Grande is a bestselling author and an in-demand motivational speaker. Her inspirational memoir, The Distance Between Us, tells the story of her life before and after she illegally immigrated from Mexico to the United States. At the age of nine, Grande left Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, to follow her parents who had immigrated to the United States years earlier – her father leaving when Grande was just two years old. After entering the country as an undocumented immigrant, she went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college, receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University.
In 2018, Grande released a sequel to her memoir called A Dream Called Home, a moving account of her experience as a first-generation Latina university student and aspiring writer determined to build a new life for herself. Her other books include Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing with Butterflies, and her most recent novel, A Ballad of Love and Glory, which tells a story of love and survival during the Mexican-American War, and has been called “epic and exquisitely wrought” by New York Times bestselling author Patricia Engel. Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by numerous schools and cities across the country, and she has received many awards, including an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the Luis Leal Award for distinction in Chicano/Latino literature. In 2012 she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Distance Between Us, young readers’ version, received a 2017 International Literacy Association Children’s Book Award and a 2016 Eureka! Honor Award from the California Reading Association.
In her lectures and keynote presentations, Grande sheds light on the challenges and experiences facing undocumented immigrants in the United States and is an important voice in the ongoing national conversation around immigration politics. She currently resides in Woodland, California with her husband and two children.
Raves and Reviews
A brutally honest book… the “Angela’s Ashes” of the modern Mexican immigrant experience.”
— Los Angeles Times
I’ve been waiting for this book for decades.”
— Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
Reyna Grande’s A Dream Called Home is a moving memoir about building a family, becoming a writer, and redefining America. Writers in need of inspiration should read this book.”
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of The Sympathizer
Grande is a fierce, smart, shimmering light of a writer with an important story to tell.”
— Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Grande’s spare, elegantly written tale…is a timely and riveting read.”
— People magazine
Grande is the kind of unsparing witness whose voice we don’t hear enough.”
— Slate magazine
Reyna Grande is a fearless writer and a tireless warrior for the unrepresented and silenced. Her power is growing with every book.”
— Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Devil’s Highway
Reyna Grande is a national treasure; her vision is not only singular, but essential to our contemporary culture. This is a beacon of a book.”
— Carolina De Robertis, award-winning author of The Gods of Tango
The news cycle tends to reduce immigration stories to political talking points, but Grande’s keen insight and scrupulous prose remind us just how layered and inspiring those stories actually are.”
— Dallas Morning News
In the Media
“Reyna Grande on Giving Her Kids the Childhood She Never Had”
June 7, 2022
“Reyna Grande wants her new novel to help us rethink the term ‘invasion’”
March 15, 2022
“American Dirt Has Us Talking. That’s a Good Thing.”
January 30, 2020
“I Lost My Mother Tongue — and Almost My Mom”
February 28, 2019
“Reyna Grande on Her Latest Memoir, ‘A Dream Called Home'”
January 17, 2019
“In A Dream Called Home, Author Reyna Grande Chronicles Her Path to the American Dream”
October 12, 2018
