Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983, though her family moved to the United States two years later. Shortly after her father earned a Ph.D. in Wisconsin, the family moved to Costa Rica, followed by South Korea and South Africa. Luiselli lived there until she moved back to Mexico City at the age of sixteen, though she soon left to complete high school in India before returning once again to attend the National Autonomous University of Mexico. After majoring in philosophy, she moved to New York City to work as an intern at the United Nations. During this time, she also studied Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she earned her doctorate degree. She published her first book in 2012, a collection of essays written in Spanish called Papeles Falsos. In 2013, she published the novel La historia de mis dientes, which appeared in English two years later as The Story of My Teeth. She has worked extensively with undocumented child migrants in the United States, an experience that informed her book-length essay Tell Me How It Ends, which was published in 2017, as well as her novel Lost Children Archive, published in 2019. She lives in New York City, has a daughter and a stepson, and is married to the novelist Álvaro Enrigue.