Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-American author best known for the book of essays "Sidewalks" and the novel "Faces in the Crowd," which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Her 2015 novel, "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, and the Premio Metropolis Azul in Canada. Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications such as The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker.

Her other book, "Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions," was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

In 2014, Luiselli was the recipient of the National Book Foundation "5 under 35" award. In 2019, she won a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a MacArthur "genius" award. In 2020, she was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature by the Vilcek Foundation.

Luiselli started a literacy program for girls in a detention center in upstate New York that focuses on creative writing. She is passionate about researching and writing about mass incarceration in the United States, with a focus on detention centers.

She is currently working on a performance piece with poet Natalie Diaz related to mass incarceration and violence against women.

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