Born in Matamoros, Mexico, in 1964, she is one of the most relevant voices in contemporary Mexican literature. Novelist, poet, short-story writer and essayist, she is the only author to have been recognised twice with the Sor Juana Inés de Cruz International Prize for Nadie me verá llorar, in 2011 and La muerte me da in 2009. She is an MD Anderson Distinguished Professor and founder of the PhD in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Texas.

Her most recent books are Autobiografía del algodón (Random House Literature, 2020), El invencible verano de Liliana (PRH, 2021), and Grieving. Dispatches from in Wounded Country (The Feminist Press, 2020, translated by Sarah Booker and finalist for the 2021 NBCC Award). New and Selected Stories, was published by Dorothy Project in 2022. 

Most recently, she has won the 2018 Shirley Jackson Prize, the 2021 Ibero-American Donoso Prize, the 2021 Nuevo León Alfonso Reyes Prize, the 2021 Mazatlan Prize, the 2021 José Donoso Prize, the 2021 Xavier Villaurrutia Writers' Prize for Writers, and the 2022 Rodolfo Walsh Prize. In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.