Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-American author whose work encompasses fiction, essays, and hybrid literary forms. Luiselli explores themes of dislocation, translation, and migration, writing in both Spanish and English. Her work draws from Latin American, American, and European literary traditions, and she often addresses the complexities of authorship and narrative form. Luiselli completed a doctorate in comparative literature at Columbia University and teaches literature and creative writing at Bard College. She has also contributed as a librettist for New York City Ballet.

Luiselli's literary career began with the essay collection "Sidewalks" and the novel "Faces in the Crowd," which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her novel "The Story of My Teeth" was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction. The novel, which originated as a commission for an art gallery associated with Grupo Jumex, was first serialized for factory workers in Mexico.

Luiselli's nonfiction book "Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions" is based on her experiences as an interpreter for Central American migrants seeking legal status in the United States. The book examines the challenges of narrating the fragmented stories of children facing deportation and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her novel "Lost Children Archive" builds on these themes, offering a fictionalized account of a family's road trip from New York to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, interwoven with stories of the Central American migration crisis. The New York Times named it one of the "10 Best Books of the Year," and it received the Rathbone Folio Prize, the Dublin Award, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, as well as nominations for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize.

Luiselli has received several honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Carnegie Medal, and an American Book Award. The Vilcek Foundation recognized her with a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. Her work, which interrogates the United States' immigration system and highlights the experiences of those affected by mass deportation, has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, and has been translated into more than 30 languages.

In addition to her writing, Luiselli is involved in activism and education. She started a literacy program for girls in a detention center in upstate New York focused on creative writing and researches issues related to mass incarceration and detention centers in the United States. Through her innovative literary forms and engagement with social issues, Luiselli examines the ways stories are constructed and transmitted across generations, contributing to contemporary literature and immigration discourse.