NEW YORK (AP) — Benjamin Alire Sáenz, an award-winning fiction writer and poet who drew upon his sexuality and his life on the Southern border, has died at age 71. He was the first Latino to win the PEN/Faulkner prize. Sáenz, born in Old Picacho, New Mexico, was an ordained Catholic priest who eventually left the order and came out as gay. He received the PEN/Faulkner award in 2013 for “Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club,” a story collection set in El Paso, and across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Starting in the 1990s, he taught for decades at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he had received a master’s degree in creative writing.