Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican author living in the United States. She is the author of the book essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction.

She was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her most recent book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2020 novel, Lost Children Archive, won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

In 2014, Luiselli received the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" award. In 2019, she won a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a MacArthur "Genius Grant." In 2020, the Vilcek Foundation awarded her a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature and the Folio Prize. In addition, Luiselli is a member of the Inter-American Dialogue.

After earning a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Luiselli moved to New York City to dance. She eventually studied comparative literature at Columbia University, where she completed a Ph.D. She teaches literature and creative writing at Bard College, collaborates as a writer with several art galleries, and has worked as a librettist for the New York City Ballet. She served as a juror for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2016.

Several of Luiselli's books are based on real-world experiences. The Story of My Teeth (2015) was first written in serial for workers in a Jumex juice factory in Mexico as part of a commission from Galería Jumex. Her nonfiction work Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017) is based on her experiences volunteering as an interpreter for young Central American migrants seeking legal status in the United States. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 2017. Her work with asylum-seeking children from Latin America also informs the central theme in her 2019 novel Lost Children Archive.

Luiselli started a literacy program for girls in a detention center in upstate New York that focuses on creative writing. Luiselli is passionate about researching and writing about mass incarceration in the United States, with a focus on detention centers. She is working on a performance piece with the poet Natalie Diaz about mass incarceration and violence against women.

Luiselli has been interested in writing about and working to improve the plight of asylum-seeking children from Latin America, a theme in her 2020 novel, Lost Children Archive. She began writing Lost Children Archive in 2014 "as a loudspeaker for all of [her] political rage" after serving as a court translator for children from Latin America involved in the migration crisis.

 The creation of this book was also a reaction to her daughter working to understand the migration crisis for herself. Before completing Lost Children Archive in 2019, Luiselli published Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions which uses the format of the questions she used in the court when interviewing the children and includes her experience with applying for a green card. The time spent writing the essay allowed her to write Lost Children Archive with "more open questions and open ends instead of political stances that are too loud and obvious by themselves."