Oscar Cásares is the author of Brownsville, a collection of short stories, and the novels Amigoland and Where We Come From. His writing has earned him fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Texas Institute of Letters, among others. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Texas Monthly. Originally from Brownsville, he began writing to share some of his family’s stories about life in the Rio Grande Valley, where they began settling in the mid 1800s. His theater performance, “Postcards from the Border,” stemmed from the need to tell his children a more complete story of the borderlands, beyond the negative images portrayed in the media. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, since 2004, he has taught creative writing at University of Texas at Austin.