Cecilia Ballí

Cecilia Ballí is a contributor to Texas Monthly and Harper’s magazines. 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). 

She was a finalist in 2004 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. In 2008, she was a distinguished finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award given by the Columbia University School of Journalism. Ballí began her journalism career as a reporter for The Brownsville Herald and the San Antonio Express-News. She is a graduate of Stanford and Rice universities and lives in Austin, where she is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Texas. She writes about violence along the U.S.-Mexican border and is working on a book about the construction of a border fence.