Reyna Grande is an author whose life and work speak to resilience. Born in Mexico, she was left behind for years before embarking on a perilous journey to reunite with her parents in the United States as an undocumented immigrant at age nine. These experiences with family separation and migration became the heartbeat of her writing. The first in her family to graduate from college, she earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA from Antioch University.
Her acclaimed memoirs The Distance Between Us and A Dream Called Home—recently named a “Best Book of the 21st Century” by Kirkus Reviews—illuminate the realities of childhood immigration. Her diverse body of work also includes novels such as Across a Hundred Mountains and the historical epic A Ballad of Love and Glory. An American Book Award winner and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Grande has been featured in The New York Times and on Oprah’s Book Club. Her forthcoming memoir-in-essays, Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget, will be published in May 2026. Grande lives in Woodland, California, with her husband and two children, continuing to amplify undocumented voices and the healing power of storytelling.