2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award Finalist
2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award Finalist
Cecilia Ballí
for her currently untitled book on the Juárez murders (to be published by Henry Holt and Company/ Metropolitan Books)
Judges' Citation
"Cecilia Ballí's as yet untitled work-in-progress is about the disappearances of young women from Juárez, Mexico—a rapidly growing city full of factories near the U.S. border that is a special kind of global wasteland in which neither the traditions of the old world nor the protections of the modern world pertain. Ballí approaches the subject with journalistic rigor enriched by levels of deeper knowledge. The first is her perspective as a Mexican-American. Ballí's own mother migrated from a rural birthplace to a city factory, when starting out in life. Secondly, because Ballí looks Mexican and is young, she has first hand experience of the threatening machismo atmosphere of Juárez, where the police are at best lackadaisical in following up on disappearances, even when bodies are recovered. These personal dimensions are not separate from her journalistic investigation, but inform it seamlessly. The result is a work that is imbedded in the particulars of locality and the intimate facts of the lives of particular families and individuals. And yet it also resonates with larger truths of our time the world over."
Bio
Cecilia Ballí is a contributing writer for Texas Monthly Magazine. Her nonfiction book about the serialized sexual murder of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, will be published by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co. A native of Brownsville, Texas, she has researched and written about the U.S.-Mexico border for many years. Her personal essays have appeared in various anthologies, including Puro Border (Cinco Puntos Press), Colonize This! (Seal Press), Border-line Personalities (Rayo/Harpercollins), Rio Grande (UT Press), and Hecho en Tejas (UNM Press). In 2004, she was a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and the John Bartlow Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism. That same year, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists named her Emerging Journalist of the Year.
Ballí began her journalism career as a reporter for The Brownsville Herald and the San Antonio Express-News. She has also been published in Latina and Harper’s magazines. She is a graduate of Stanford University and lives in Houston, where she is completing a doctorate in cultural anthropology at Rice University.