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. In 2020, the Texas Institute of Letters awarded Where We Come From the Jesse H. Jones Award for the Best Book of Fiction. His writing focuses on the US-Mexico border, where he grew up and his family began to settle in the mid 1800s. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Texas Monthly, and on National Public Radio. Since 2004, he has taught creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.