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Reyna Grande is a Mexican immigrant author best known for her award winning novel Across a Hundred Mountains published by Atria Books, which, though a work of fiction, draws heavily on Grande's experiences growing up in Mexico and her Illegal immigration to the United States. Her second novel, Dancing with Butterflies, also garnered critical acclaim and awards. An excerpt from her second novel appeared in 2008 as a short story titled "Adriana" in Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature edited by Daniel Olivas.
In 2012, Atria Books published Grande’s memoir, The Distance Between Us, which is a coming-of-age story based on her experiences as an undocumented immigrant. In an interview published by the Los Angeles Review of Books on December 6, 2012, Grande explained why she decided to part from fiction to tell her story: "Even though my novels are very personal, and the material I write about is drawn from my own experience, they are fictional stories. After I completed my second novel, I wanted to write the real story about my life, before and after illegally immigrating to the US from Mexico. I wanted to shed light on the complexities of immigration and how immigration affected my entire family in both positive and negative ways." It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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