On October 20, 2020, the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring Valeria Luiselli in conversation with Aminatta Forna. Introduced by Lakshmi Krishnan. 

Valeria Luiselli's recent novel, Lost Children Archive was a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize, and has been named a best book of 2019 by Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, Vulture, and Time. Lost Children Archive sits beside Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, Luiselli’s ground-breaking book-length essay that has become a touchstone text for those looking to facilitate meaningful and informed conversations around the immigration crisis. Luiselli is also the author of the novels The Story of My Teeth and Faces in the Crowd, and Sidewalks, an essay collection. She is the recipient of a 2019 Macarthur “Genius Grant” and her works have been recognized by the National Book Critics Circle, The National Book Foundation, The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She is a writer in residence at Bard College in New York. 

Aminatta Forna is a novelist, memoirist, and essayist. She was born in Scotland and raised between Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness (2018), The Hired Man (2013), The Memory of Love (2011), and Ancestor Stones (2006). She is also the author of the memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002). Her honors include a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, and a Hurston Wright Legacy Award, among others. Forna is the current Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. 

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

“I think it's really important to be transparent about the place from which you write and the way that place determines your relationship to that which you write about,” award-winning author of Lost Children Archive Valeria Luiselli tells Alicia in this provocative conversation about the meaning and limits of identity. Luiselli, a green card holder, fully recognizes she is “someone who has enormous privilege and therefore also enormous responsibility toward my community.” That sense of duty compelled her to volunteer as a court translator for Central American children who were being processed as asylum seekers during the Obama administration. And it continues to help her interrogate her place in the world as an artist.

Follow Valeria on Twitter @ValeriaLuiselli and IG @valeria.luiselli. If you loved this episode, listen to Frances de Pontes Peebles and Carmen Maria Machado for more on summoning the muse.  Show your love and become a Latina to Latina Patreon supporter!

This week, host Jason Jefferies is joined by Carnegie Medal winner and MacArthur 'genius' grant recipient Valeria Luiselli to discuss her latest novel, Lost Children Archive.  Topics of discussion include soundscaping, COVID-19, road trip novels, parenting, Cormac McCarthy, American Dirt, The Book With No Pictures and much more.  Valeria Luiselli will be at Quail Ridge Books on October 27, 2020 as part of the North Carolina Book Festival Arts & Lecture Series.  Signed copies of Lost Children Archive can be preordered here (in hardcover) and here (in paperback).

Today on The Stacks Book Club we discuss Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli, a book that looks at the immigration crisis at the US/Mexico border for the children who make the journey unaccompanied. Our guest Asyer Salman (The Wrong End of the Table) joins the show to talk about empathy, the language around immigration, and what we can do to help.
There are no spoilers on this episode.

You can find links to everything we discuss on today's show on The Stacks' Website: https://thestackspodcast.com/2019/12/04/ep-88-tell-me-how-it-ends

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Valeria Luiselli first travelled to the U.S.–Mexico border in 2014, when the current immigration crisis began to heat up. Under the Trump Presidency, the border has become the dead center of American politics, and Luiselli returned with the radio producer Pejk Malinovski. Luiselli is a Mexican writer living in New York, and the author of “Lost Children Archive” and other books. She wrote in The New Yorker about Wild West reënactments, in which actors stage scenes like a gunfight at O.K. Corral. In Tombstone, Arizona, and Shakespeare, New Mexico, she finds a very particular view of Western history that elides the U.S.’s long and complicated relationship with Mexico, which once owned this region. She finds that historical reënactments feed a notion of the border region as a lawless frontier requiring vigilantes to defend American interests.

This month Jess talks to the Mexican author Valeria Luiselli about her most recent novel "The Lost Children Archive", a bold and wise book which is as much about protecting our children, and being children ourselves, as it is about the horrors of the refugee experience, as currently seen around the US-Mexico border.

'The Lost Children' archive is also fascinating in the way it deals with recordings of reality and everyday experience, including sounds. We talk to Valeria about the sounds which surrounded her during night-time sessions writing the book, finishing up with a sound experiment of our own.

Hosted by Jessica Johannesson with music by The Bookshop Band

If you like the sound of 'The Lost Children Archive' take a look at this reading list for more reading suggestions.