Award-winning author Luis Alberto Urrea will speak Friday, October 9, at Cleveland State University’s Main Classroom Auditorium, 2121 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland.

Presented by CSU’s Cultural Crossings lecture series, Urrea’s appearance will include a book signing at 5:45 p.m., followed by a presentation titled “Universal Border: From Tijuana to the World” at 6:15 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public.

Urrea, a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is the author of 14 books that span numerous genres. The Devil’s Highway, his 2004 nonfiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Lannan Literary Award. His highly acclaimed historical novels The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005) and Queen of America (2011) tell the story of his great aunt Teresita Urrea, a Mexican folk hero at the turn of the 20th century.

Urrea won the American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, in 1999. The following year, he was inducted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame.