Join us on December 10, 2020 at 6:00 p.m. for a virtual conversation with award-winning novelist and essayist Valeria Luiselli. Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive, was a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, and has been named a best book of 2019 by Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, Vulture and Time. Luiselli will be in conversation with the Library’s executive director, Jenny Emery Davidson.
Lost Children Archive re-imagines the classic road trip novel as an urgent examination of the immigration crisis of the U.S. Southern Border. Luiselli’s inventive and compelling novel blends perspectives, literary forms, photographs, news reports and sounds to follow the paths that this unforgettable novel takes to the heart of the most urgent and timely questions of national identity and social justice.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a Writer in Residence at Bard College and lives in New York City.
