Valeria Luiselli - Novelist & Essayist Presented by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City. Her critically acclaimed narrative Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions has been described as a call to action and “vital for understanding the crisis that immigrants to the U.S. are facing” (Publisher’s Weekly).

Luiselli is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth and Faces in the Crowd, and the essay collection Sidewalks. Tell Me How It Ends was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s and McSweeney’s. Luiselli has earned the title of one of the 20 best Mexican writers under 40, as well as National Book Foundation’s ‘5 under 35’ award.

Tell Me How It Ends is structured around the forty questions Valeria Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation. Her writing humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.