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Virginia Alanís
Virginia Alanís(born on October 22, 1968) is a Mexican American author, born in Allende, Nuevo León, Mexico and raised in Dallas, Texas since the age of two. Her debut book, Love Field (2016) a coming of age novel, was chosen as a Las Comadres Book Club selection in February 2017. Her forthcoming book, Monterrey is a historical novel about Diego Montemayor, her 13th great-grandfather who founded Monterrey, Nuevo León and went on to become governor of the state. Contents
 * 1) Background and education
 * 2) Novels
 * 3) Further reading
 * 4) References
 * 5) External links

Background and education
Virginia Alanís was born in 1968 in Allende, Nuevo León, Mexico, one of six children of Paulino Alanis Sr. (b. 1946) and Maria Elva Cano (b. 1947). Alanis is their eldest daughter.

Virginia Alanis is a descendant of the Spanish Conquistadors and Crypto Jews who settled in northeastern Mexico. One of her earliest European ancestors to Mexico, Diego Montemayor, emigrated to the Kingdom of New Spain after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition in 1547, then became founder of Monterrey, Nuevo León in 1596, and his descendants found wealth and repute in both what is now Mexico and in America. Aspects of Alanis’s ancestry and family background have partially inspired her fiction writing.

Alanis has traced her earliest Native American ancestor back to Ana Maya who lived around the middle to late 1600s, using mtDNA. She is part of the We Are Cousins mtDNA project by Crispin Rendon.

In 1987, Alanis graduated from the Business and Management Center High School, where she excelled at literature. After graduating with honors from the Business and Management Center High School, she attended Southern Methodist University, an elite private university in Dallas. She wanted to pursue a legal career, but Alanis’s desire to write was too intense. At SMU, she studied creative writing under David Haynes, who appeared on the Granta Best Young American Novelists 1996 list, and met the likes of John Irving and Isabel Allende at SMU’s Literary Festival. She also served on the editorial board of the campus literary magazine, Espejo. In 2004, Alanis was awarded an editorial fellowship at the SMU Press, where she was mentored by senior editor, Kathy Lang. Alanis went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Southern Methodist University in 2002 and a master’s degree in English two years later in 2004.

Love Field
Her first novel, Love Field, which took her three years to write, was published in 2016 by Floricanto Press. It concerns a girl, Laura Cano, from Dallas, Texas in her last year of high school. The plot deals with coming of age, identity, and class distinctions.

Monterrey(forthcoming)
Monterrey is a historical novel about a general in 16th-century Spanish colonial Mexico who wants to make the world a better place after a personal tragedy. It’s the story of Diego Montemayor, her 13th great-grandfather who founded Monterrey, Nuevo León and went on to become governor of the state.