Valeria Luiselli: Brooklyn's Chronicler of Migration and Memory
- Marina Aris
- Jul 23
- 3 min read
A note from our founder
Our eleventh tribute in this new chapter goes to a writer whose childhood spanned continents before her fiction ever did. Valeria Luiselli builds narratives out of displacement, memory, and the realities of migration, and she now calls Brooklyn the place she writes from.
A Childhood Without Borders
Valeria Luiselli was born on August 16, 1983, in Mexico City. Because her father was a diplomat, she grew up across the globe, living in South Korea, South Africa, and India before returning to Mexico and eventually moving to the United States. She earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and later a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
Polyphonic, Structurally Inventive
Luiselli's work is celebrated for its polyphonic, structurally inventive qualities, frequently blending fiction, essay, and documentary elements into something that resists easy categorization. Her narratives return again and again to displacement, language, the mechanics of memory, and the urgent realities of migration.
Lost Children Archive
Her most acclaimed novel, Lost Children Archive, published in 2019, won the Dublin Literary Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, cementing her as one of the most significant literary voices writing on migration today.
A Brooklyn Academic Life
A recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, Luiselli's writing has been translated into more than twenty languages. Her essays and journalism appear regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Granta. She is a professor at Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Bibliography
Fiction
Faces in the Crowd (2011) — Her layered debut novel, shifting between a young mother in Mexico City writing a book and her past life as a translator in New York chasing the ghost of an early 20th-century poet.
The Story of My Teeth (2013) — An eccentric, philosophical comedy following Highway, an auctioneer who claims to possess the teeth of historical icons (like Plato and Virginia Woolf), written in collaboration with workers at a juice factory in Mexico.
Lost Children Archive (2019) — An ambitious road-trip novel following a blended family traveling from New York to Arizona, interwoven with the stories of migrant children missing at the southwestern border.
Beginning Middle End (2026) — A warm, poetic novel following a summer on the island of Sicily amidst wild winds, volcanic rumbles, and unexpected tempests.
Non-Fiction & Essays
Sidewalks (2010) — A beautiful collection of philosophical and personal essays tracing her walks through cities like Mexico City, Venice, and New York.
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017) — A fierce, devastatingly structured essay framed around the forty questions Luiselli used when working as a volunteer court translator for undocumented Central American children facing deportation.
READ LUISELLI
Start with Lost Children Archive for the novel that brought her the widest acclaim, or Tell Me How It Ends if you'd rather begin with the essay that shaped it. Either way, you're reading a writer whose sense of home was built by moving, before she made a home in Brooklyn at all. Get the book.
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