Urrea is the son of a Mexican father and an American mother. He attended the University of California, San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana, and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard University. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College, and the University of Colorado, and he was the writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, Illinois, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Devil's Highway is his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert.

The historical novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter, tells the story of Teresita Urrea, sometimes known as The Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc.

He was a speaker at the 2008 Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and the 2008 Banned Books Week Read-Out, Chicago.

Urrea's first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award.

In 1994, he won the 1994 Colorado Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being as well as the Western States Book Award in poetry. He was also included in The 1996 Best American Poetry collection.

In 1999, Urrea won an American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life.

His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine.