Lupe Ruiz-Flores

Lupe Ruiz-Flores is a bilingual children’s author known for her award-winning bilingual picture books and middle-grade fiction that center Mexican American experiences and history. Born and raised in southwest Texas, she has also lived in Thailand and Japan, experiences that inform the cultural breadth of her storytelling. A former aerospace engineering technician, she later worked as a staff writer for a local newspaper and has written short stories, poems, and ghostwritten work for a national magazine.

Ruiz-Flores is the author of Piece by Piece: Ernestine’s Gift for President Roosevelt, an historical picture book set during the Great Depression in San Antonio, Texas, which tells the true story of a girl who constructs a wooden art piece for President Franklin D. Roosevelt; the book received a Junior Library Guild selection and was named to Bank Street College of Education’s 2024 Best Children’s Books of the Year. She has written six bilingual picture books published by Arte Público Press, contributed to anthologies such as Thanku: Poems of Gratitude and Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America, and authored the middle-grade novel The Pecan Sheller, a Pura Belpré Award–winning book set in 1930s Texas. Ruiz-Flores has been a featured author at the Texas Book