Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. ShareNEW 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. Sáenz, born in Old Picacho, New Mexico, was an ordained Catholic priest who eventually left the order and came out as gay. Read MoreHe 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.