Biography

David Bowles is a Mexican-American author and translator from Texas. He has written multiple award-winning titles, among them They Call Me Güero, the 13th Street chapter book series, the young adult novel of historical fiction The Prince & the Coyote, and the picture book My Two Border Towns.

David grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, the strip of South Texas right on the border and the Gulf of Mexico. His childhood was filled with the magical and often spooky tales of his grandmother, Marie Garza, who encouraged David to read. Books set him on a road no one else in his family had taken: a word-paved path to college.

Afterward, he became an English teacher. When working with kids who didn’t like to read, he started re-telling his family’s folktales in short-story form to get them interested. After a decade, he collected those stories into his first book.

Now a few dozen books later, David teaches at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. He spends most of the rest of his time writing or traveling through Mexico, the land of his father’s ancestors, studying its history. He likes to focus on indigenous culture, philosophy, and language, especially Nahuatl —spoken by the Aztecs and millions of other Nahuas today.

Presently, David serves as the president of the Texas Institute of Letters. he and his wife split their time between their homes in the Rio Grande Valley and a small Zapotec community on the coast of Oaxaca in Mexico. They are usually accompanied by their cat Kimi, who thinks that she’s a dog.