Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli (born August 16, 1983) is a Mexican-American author. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. 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.

Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul. Her 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 for Criticism. Luiselli's 2019 novel Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

In 2014, Luiselli was the recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award. In 2019, she won a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2020, the Vilcek Foundation awarded her a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature and she won the Folio Prize.

Early life Luiselli was born in Mexico City, and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, with her family at the age of two. Her father's work in NGOs and later as a diplomat moved the family to Costa Rica, South Korea, and South Africa. After her parents separated, she moved back to Mexico City with her mother at the age of 16. Luiselli attended UWC Mahindra College in India before returning to Mexico. She completed a BA in philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and then lived in Spain and France. At age 25, she moved to New York City to pursue a master's degree in Latin American studies and a PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University. She teaches literature and creative writing at Bard College, collaborates as a writer with a number of 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. 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. but later separated. They have a daughter together, with whom Luiselli lives in New York City.

Faces in the Crowd (Los ingrávidos) Faces in the Crowd (2011) is a triptych that follows the perspectives of the narrator, a young mother living and working as a translator in New York, the protagonist of that mother's semi-autobiographical novel, and Gilberto Owen, a 20th-century Mexican poet. The Story of My Teeth was written in chapters and distributed to the workers of a juice factory in Mexico. The workers read the chapters out loud and provided comments on them, which Luiselli recorded and took into consideration as she wrote the next chapter.

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions In this book, Luiselli draws from her experience working as an interpreter for Central American child migrants.

Awards and recognition 2018: American Book Award for Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions 2019: MacArthur Fellowship 2021: Dublin Literary Award 2023: Royal Society of Literature International Writer