The son of Mexican immigrants, Troncoso was born and grew up on the east side of El Paso, Texas in rural Ysleta. During their first years in Texas, his family lived with kerosene lamps and stoves and an outhouse in the backyard. He attended Ysleta High School and became editor of the school newspaper. (His paternal grandfather was Santiago Troncoso, editor and publisher of El Día, the first daily newspaper in Juárez, Mexico.)

He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and received two graduate degrees in international relations and philosophy from Yale University.

A Fulbright scholar, Troncoso was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Alumni Hall of Fame, Texas Institute of Letters, and Texas Literary Hall of Fame. He is also a member of PEN America, a writers’ organization protecting free expression and celebrating literature, and the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest professional organization of writers. He was named a Fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters, the first Mexican American writer to receive this distinction.

Among the numerous literary awards Troncoso has won are the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, Gold Medal for Best Novel-Adventure or Drama from International Latino Book Awards, Bronze Award for Anthologies from Independent Publisher Book Awards, Gold Medal for Best Collection of Short Stories from International Latino Book Awards, Southwest Book Award, Bronze Award for Essays from ForeWord Reviews, and the Silver Award for Multicultural Adult Fiction from ForeWord Reviews.

The El Paso City Council voted unanimously to rename the public library branch in Ysleta as the Sergio Troncoso Branch Library. Later the author established the annual Troncoso Reading Prizes for middle school and high school students in Ysleta.

His literary papers are archived at The Wittliff Collections in San Marcos, Texas.

Sergio Troncoso is the author of Nobody's Pilgrims, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, The Nature of Truth, and From This Wicked Patch of Dust; and as editor, Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds and Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence.

He often writes about the United States-Mexico border, working-class immigrants, families and fatherhood, crossing cultural, psychological, and philosophical borders, and the border beyond the border.

Troncoso teaches at the Yale Writers' Workshop in New Haven, Connecticut. A past president of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has also served as a judge for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, New Letters Literary Awards in the Essay category, and Jesse H. Jones Fellowship for writers. His work has appeared in CNN Opinion, Houston Chronicle, Other Voices, New Letters, Yale Review, Pleiades, Michigan Quarterly Review, Texas Highways, and Texas Monthly Magazine.

He is represented by Jennifer Thompson at the Nordlyset Literary Agency.