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Valeria Luiselli, an author and Bard College professor can be found teaching creative writing classes this year as a visiting Harvard professor. She has published six books, including the critically acclaimed “The Story of My Teeth” which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the American Book Award.
Winner of the 2019 American Book Award, Luiselli is also an author and visiting Professor of Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration in Harvard’s English Department. Luiselli centers her work around bridging the gap between literature and social justice. Across her career, she has worked closely with factory workers, incarcerated people, and children detained at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In a recent interview with The Harvard Crimson, Luiselli described the crucial overlap of her work with both in-person and literary activism. Writing in both English and Spanish, Luiselli offers a completely novel use of language. One way Luiselli toys with language is by translating her own writing back and forth, letting the words decide for her what language (or languages) to use for each text.
“I never know which [language] I should use for a project when I'm just starting,” Luiselli says. She recommends that students who are bilingual “just try both, until something falls into place, or until maybe the text itself reveals that it just needs to be bilingual.”
Although originally born in Mexico City, Luiselli spent much of her childhood moving from country to country. Much of her writing pulls from her cultural experiences in these different countries including South Korea, South Africa, India, and the United States.
When speaking about her most recent novel, “Lost Children Archive,” Luiselli said, “I tried both languages. And one day it just started flowing better in English. And so you know, it's something that has to do a lot with rhythm and tone.”
Luiselli considers translation an “art form.” While she has collaborated with other translators in the past, nowadays, she only translates her own work, finding this process essential to her “creative process.”
Luiselli also believes in forming a relationship with her work, not only with language, but with her characters — even those that she cannot personally relate to.
“I almost felt like I had to allow a character to inhabit me in a way where I just needed to channel and not necessarily, always like them.”
In both "Faces in the Crowd" and “The Story of My Teeth,” Luiselli focuses her stories on male main characters.
“I write from the point of view of a man in the 1920s… whose views on masculinity and femininity and race and many other things are not my own,” said Luiselli about her character from “Faces in the Crowd,” “but I had to make the effort of inhabiting him.”
Conversely, she recalls, in “The Story of My Teeth,” “I wrote that book in a series of installments for workers in the juice factory. And I never saw their faces […] I assumed, because one assumes things wrongly, that because they were juice factory workers, they would all be guys.”
For this project, Luiselli and the factory workers sent audio files back and forth, so she did not meet any of the participants face-to-face until the book launch. She remarks, “I thought I’m going to write from the point of view of a guy […] to create a much closer proximity […] and then it turned out that at least the workers that had signed up for this experiment in writing and reading had been mostly female workers.”
Luiselli views her writing as activism, whether that be writing from the perspective of factory or border detention workers. Luiselli reveals that she writes her own books about immigration and violence against land.
“I will continue to do so because it’s the only thing I know how to do.”
Luiselli’s current writing activism continues her work teaching underserved communities, with her current role teaching a creative writing program for young girls in a New York detention center. The author sees a future of writing wherein people will be able to write honestly from their experience for themselves and for readers. “I do feel like teaching creative writing, especially to a generation that has had to go through a brutal form of displacement is giving [them] the tools to eventually write their own stories in whatever form they want.”
Valeria Luiselli’s understanding of the power of language has enabled her own writing, activism, and teaching. Her unique perspective on the creative process, as well as her confidence in her own abilities allows her to experiment with different languages and techniques. From writing from the perspective of characters completely different from her, to incorporating lived experiences into her work, Luiselli has developed all of the necessary tools to create meaningful stories and hopes to pass that gift on to the next generation of writers.
