'Big Read' features an evening with Mexican-American author Luis Alberto Urrea

LANSING — Best-selling Mexican-American author Luis Alberto Urrea will speak in Lansing on Wednesday as part of the National Endowment for the Arts' "Big Read."

Michigan State University was one of 75 nonprofit organizations across the country to receive this year’s NEA Big Read grant, meant to develop programming around a sort of shared experience of reading a particular book.

In this instance, the book was Urrea’s "Into the Beautiful North," the story of 19-year-old Nayeli and her friends, who journey from a small village in Sinaloa, Mexico, to search for the husbands, fathers, and brothers who left to find work in the United States.

"At the time I wrote the grant, there were only two books out of the NEA's selection of books that were written by Mexican-Americans," said MSU Associate Professor of English Sheila Contreras, who was awarded a $14,000 grant to host the Big Read in the Greater Lansing/Mid-Michigan area.

She chose Urrea's book because Mexican-American literature is her area of expertise, because it fit with local demographics and "because of the national discourse right now around migration and immigration and that focuses on Mexico specifically," Contreras said.

Urrea is a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame. He is the best-selling author of 17 books and has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays.

MSU partnered with Capital Area District Libraries, the Hispanic/Latino Commission of Michigan, Allen Neighborhood Center and the Peace Education Center to bring the Big Read to Mid-Michigan.

Contreras said it's more typical for these grants to go to public libraries, less typical that they go to universities.

"But because of my own interest, I really want to promote U.S./Latino literature, Mexican-American literature, to a broad readership" she said. "But I also want to expose Mexican Americans, people of Mexican descent and other Latinos to literature that comes from our communities. We don’t have those reading experiences in school very often. Even in in higher ed."

Urrea will do a reading followed by a Q&A at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Robin Theatre, 1105 S. Washington Ave. in Lansing's REO Town neighborhood. The event is free and open to the public. For information, go to www.cal.msu.edu/msu-big-read-2018.

Contact Vickki Dozier at (517) 267-1342 or vdozier@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @vickkiD.