Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed Mexican author and essayist whose work spans fiction, nonfiction and soundscapes. Born in Mexico City and raised in South Korea, South Africa and India, she is the author of the essay collections “Tell Me How It Ends” and “Sidewalks”; the sonic essay “Echoes From the Borderlands”; and the novels “Faces in the Crowd,” “The Story of My Teeth,” “Lost Children Archive” and “Beginning Middle End.”

Luiselli is a recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and has been honored with the Dublin Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Carnegie Medal and an American Book Award. Her work has also been recognized with nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Foundation and the Booker Prize. Additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Vilcek Prize and a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund.

Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and McSweeney’s, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Her ongoing soundscape and oral history project, “Echoes From the Borderlands,” has been presented at venues including DIA Chelsea and the Harvard ArtLab.

If you are unable to attend in-person, you may watch the event live via Media Central. Closed captioning is provided.

This event is co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books. The Spencer Trask Lecture Series was founded in 1891 with a gift of $10,000 from Spencer Trask of the Class of 1866 for the purpose of supporting public lectures at the University on subjects of current philosophical, artistic, or scientific interest.