Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-American novelist and essayist, one of the most celebrated literary voices of her generation. Born in Mexico City, she spent her childhood in multiple countries as her father was a diplomat. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Lost Children Archive (2019) won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Dublin Literary Award, and was a finalist for many other awards including the Booker Prize. The novel documents a family road trip from New York to the US-Mexico border intertwined with the author's own experiences interpreting for undocumented child migrants in immigration court. Her previous books include the novel The Story of My Teeth (2015) and essay collections Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017), the last of which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Luiselli's work is known for its formal experimentation, its political urgency, and its reflections on migration, displacement, and language. She has received the Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund, and has been named one of Granta's Best Young Novelists. She is Professor of English at Wesleyan University, where she teaches literature and creative writing. She lives in Connecticut.