Valeria Luiselli

Based on Wikipedia: Valeria Luiselli

The Writer Who Listened to Juice Factory Workers

Here's an unusual way to write a novel: send each chapter to a juice factory in Mexico, have the workers read it aloud during their shifts, record their feedback, and then let their comments shape what you write next. That's exactly what Valeria Luiselli did with her novel The Story of My Teeth, and somehow that strange creative process captures something essential about who she is as a writer—someone who refuses to separate literature from the lives of ordinary people.

Luiselli has become one of the most celebrated authors of her generation. She's won a MacArthur Fellowship (what people often call a "genius grant"), the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Dublin Literary Award, and seemingly every major book prize that exists. But what makes her genuinely interesting isn't the awards shelf. It's how she arrived at writing in the first place, and what she's chosen to do with her platform.

A Childhood in Constant Motion

Born in Mexico City in 1983, Luiselli barely had time to learn the city before her family moved. When she was two years old, they relocated to Madison, Wisconsin. Her father worked for non-governmental organizations—the kind of international aid and development groups that tackle problems like poverty, health crises, and human rights—and later became a diplomat. This meant the family kept moving: Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa.

Imagine being a child with that itinerary. Each country means a new language to absorb, new friends to make, new ways of understanding how the world works. The experience left its mark. When you read Luiselli's essays and novels, you find someone obsessed with movement, borders, belonging, and the question of where anyone actually comes from.

When her parents separated, sixteen-year-old Luiselli moved back to Mexico City with her mother. But even then, she didn't stay put. She attended UWC Mahindra College in India—one of the United World Colleges, a network of international schools designed to bring together students from different countries. After that came university back in Mexico, then time in Spain and France.

When Luiselli finally landed in New York City, it wasn't to write.

It was to dance.

From Dance Studio to Dissertation

Contemporary dance brought Luiselli to New York. She came to study movement, to inhabit her body in space. At the same time, she interned at the United Nations—a detail that seems almost too perfect for someone who would later write so powerfully about migration and borders and the bureaucratic machinery that decides who belongs where.

But something shifted. Instead of pursuing dance professionally, Luiselli enrolled in the comparative literature program at Columbia University. Comparative literature is exactly what it sounds like: studying literature across languages and cultures, looking at how different traditions influence each other, reading widely across time and place. She earned her doctorate there.

This background shows in her work. Luiselli writes in both Spanish and English, translates her own books, and moves fluidly between countries and literary traditions. Her novel Faces in the Crowd weaves together three perspectives, including that of Gilberto Owen, a real twentieth-century Mexican poet. Her essays roam across cities—the sidewalks of the title of her first book, Sidewalks, could be in Mexico City or New York or anywhere in between.

She currently teaches literature and creative writing at Bard College in New York's Hudson Valley, lives in the Bronx with her family, and has worked on projects as varied as writing a libretto for the New York City Ballet and collaborating with art galleries. The woman does not like to stay in one lane.

The Book That Came From a Factory Floor

Let's return to that juice factory novel, because it's genuinely strange and wonderful.

In 2013, the Galería Jumex—an art museum funded by the Jumex juice company—commissioned Luiselli to write something. Rather than simply produce a manuscript in her apartment, she created an unusual collaboration. She wrote The Story of My Teeth in installments, and each chapter was distributed to workers at a Jumex juice factory. The workers would read the chapters aloud and discuss them. Luiselli recorded these sessions and incorporated the workers' reactions into subsequent chapters.

The novel itself tells the story of Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez Sánchez, an auctioneer with a peculiar specialty: he claims to sell the teeth of famous authors and historical figures. With the money he earns, he purchases what he believes to be Marilyn Monroe's teeth and uses them to replace his own. It's playful and absurd and deeply literary—the kind of book that winks at you while also making you think about authenticity, value, and storytelling itself.

The factory collaboration wasn't a gimmick. It was a statement about who literature belongs to. Luiselli wasn't interested in writing only for other highly educated people who had studied comparative literature. She wanted her work to live in the mouths and minds of people who spent their days making juice.

When Political Rage Demands a Book

In 2014, Luiselli started volunteering as a court interpreter for children from Central America who had arrived in the United States seeking asylum. These were kids—sometimes very young kids—who had fled violence in countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Many had made the harrowing journey north alone. Now they sat in immigration courts, their futures hanging on whether they could successfully navigate a legal system designed for adults with lawyers.

Luiselli's job was to translate. But the experience transformed her.

At the same time, her own family was applying for green cards—the documents that allow non-citizens to live permanently in the United States. She found herself in the bizarre position of shuttling between her own bureaucratic nightmare and the far more desperate situations of the children she was helping.

This dual experience produced Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, published in 2017. The structure mirrors the intake questionnaire that interpreters use when interviewing migrant children. Forty questions, forty attempts to understand how a child ended up in an American courtroom. The book braids together the children's stories with Luiselli's own immigration anxieties, and it became a finalist for both the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

But the essay wasn't enough. Luiselli had more to say. She described starting her novel Lost Children Archive in 2014 "as a loudspeaker for all of my political rage."

The rage was real. And it needed room to grow.

The Novel as Political Fury

Lost Children Archive was the first book Luiselli wrote entirely in English. It follows a family—a mother, a father, and their two children from previous relationships—on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the brutal heat of summer. The parents are both working on sound documentation projects. The mother is researching the migrant crisis. The father is recording the echoes of the Apache people who once lived in the lands they're crossing.

As they drive, the family listens to news reports about children being detained at the border. The situation outside the car presses against the situation inside it: the parents' marriage is fraying, the children are trying to understand both the abstract horror on the radio and the more immediate tension between the adults they love.

The novel won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Dublin Literary Award. It confirmed what the earlier essay had suggested: Luiselli had found a way to write about political catastrophe without sacrificing literary complexity. She wasn't writing polemic. She was writing a novel that happened to be furious about injustice.

Interestingly, Luiselli has said that writing Tell Me How It Ends first allowed her to approach the novel differently. The essay let her get some of the explicit political arguments out of her system. The novel could then work with "more open questions and open ends instead of political stances that are too loud and obvious by themselves."

Her daughter played a role too. Watching her child try to make sense of the migration crisis shaped how Luiselli thought about what the book needed to do. Children, after all, ask the questions adults have learned to stop asking.

Working Beyond the Page

Luiselli doesn't just write about detention and incarceration. She does something about it.

She started a literacy program for girls held in a detention center in upstate New York. The program focuses on creative writing—not just reading, but giving these young women tools to tell their own stories. She's also been researching and writing about mass incarceration in the United States more broadly, with particular attention to detention facilities and violence against women.

With the poet Natalie Diaz—herself a MacArthur Fellow and one of the most celebrated poets working today—Luiselli has been developing a performance piece about mass incarceration and violence against women. The collaboration suggests she's interested in forms beyond prose, in ways of reaching audiences that a novel alone might not reach.

She's also taken public political stances that go beyond her writing. Luiselli supports the cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, including publishers and literary festivals, and was an original signatory of a manifesto called "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Literary Institutions." For some readers, this will be admirable. For others, it will be controversial. Either way, it's consistent with who Luiselli seems to be: someone who believes writers have responsibilities beyond their sentences.

The Books, One by One

A brief tour through Luiselli's bibliography:

Sidewalks (2010 in Spanish, 2014 in English translation by Christina MacSweeney) was her debut, a collection of essays about cities and walking and the way we move through urban spaces. If you've ever wandered a city just to see what you'd find, these essays will feel familiar.

Faces in the Crowd (2011) is a novel built like a triptych—a three-paneled painting. One panel follows a young mother in New York who works as a translator. Another follows the protagonist of a novel that mother is writing. The third follows Gilberto Owen, the real Mexican poet I mentioned earlier. The three perspectives weave together, blurring the line between the writer and the written.

The Story of My Teeth (2013 in Spanish, 2015 in English) is the factory novel with the auctioneer of famous teeth. It's funny and strange and more accessible than you might expect from something that began as a gallery commission.

Tell Me How It Ends (2017) is the forty-question essay about migrant children and Luiselli's own immigration experience. It's short, urgent, and devastating.

Lost Children Archive (2019) is the road trip novel, the family driving toward Arizona while the radio delivers news of children in cages. Luiselli translated it into Spanish herself, with help from Daniel Saldaña París, under the title Desierto sonoro—"sonorous desert," a reference to the sound documentation at the novel's heart.

The Trajectory of Recognition

Luiselli's award history traces an arc from promising newcomer to established literary star.

In 2014, the National Book Foundation named her one of its "5 Under 35"—five writers under thirty-five years old whom the foundation identifies as deserving wider attention. The prize is essentially a bet on a writer's future, and in Luiselli's case, the bet paid off spectacularly.

Her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. 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 received the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal.

Then came 2019, a banner year. Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal. And the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a fellowship—$625,000 given over five years, with no strings attached, simply in recognition of exceptional creativity. The so-called "genius grant" goes to people in all fields, from scientists to artists to activists. For Luiselli, it was recognition that her work mattered beyond the literary world.

The next year brought the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature—a prize given specifically to immigrants who have made exceptional contributions to American society—and the Folio Prize. In 2021, she won the Dublin Literary Award, one of the richest literary prizes in the world, funded by the city of Dublin as part of its commitment to literature.

Most recently, in 2023, she was named a Royal Society of Literature International Writer, a recognition from one of the oldest literary organizations in the English-speaking world.

The Philosophy Student Who Became an Artist

Before all of this—before the novels and the awards and the MacArthur—Luiselli earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the largest and most prestigious universities in Latin America. It's the kind of background that might make you expect dense, difficult prose full of abstract arguments.

But Luiselli went the other way. Her work is grounded, embodied, specific. She writes about children in courtrooms and teeth at auctions and families in cars. The philosophy is there, but it's dissolved into stories about people moving through the world.

Maybe that's what dancing teaches you. The body matters. Movement matters. You can't just think your way through life.

And maybe that's what all those childhood relocations taught her. Home isn't a fixed point. Identity isn't a single thing. You carry your stories with you, and sometimes you have to tell them in more than one language.

What Happens Next

Luiselli is still in her early forties. Given her productivity and the recognition she's received, it seems safe to assume more books will come. She's mentioned ongoing work on mass incarceration and her collaboration with Natalie Diaz on the performance piece about violence against women.

Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages, and her work appears regularly in publications like The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. She's a member of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank focused on policy issues in the Western Hemisphere. She's served as a juror for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, one of the most prestigious international literary awards.

But the numbers and credentials only tell you so much. What matters is that Luiselli has found a way to write books that are both artistically ambitious and politically engaged, that take literary form seriously while also insisting that literature must matter in the real world. She writes about migration and movement because she's lived it—not as tourism, but as the constant fact of her life from age two onward.

The juice factory workers read her novel aloud. The children in detention learned to write their own stories. The family in Lost Children Archive drove toward something they didn't fully understand, while their children listened and learned and asked the questions no one could answer.

That's what Luiselli does. She asks the questions. And then she makes you sit with them, in whatever language you happen to speak.