Valeria Luiselli in conversation with Fanny Garcia and Florencia Ruiz Mendoza on Lost Children Archive, oral history, and documentary work.
About this event
First event of OHMA's Spring 2023 Oral History and Fiction: A Book Club series.
Valeria Luiselli in conversation with Fanny Garcia and Florencia Ruiz Mendoza about Lost Children Archive, a novel about doing oral history and documentary work. This event will be bilingual with simultaneous Spanish/English interpretation provided to all participants.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She teaches at Bard College and is a visiting professor at Harvard University.
Fanny Julissa García is a Honduran American oral historian contributing work to Central American studies. Her work focuses on immigration justice, detention and incarceration, family separation, and the transnational impact of failed border policies. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Oral History Association to work on “Separated: An Oral History Project” which documents the lived experiences of families impacted by family separation. Her work is informed by her own life’s history as a formerly undocumented immigrant and as a survivor of trauma and generational poverty. She is a graduate of Los Angeles Valley College, UCLA, and Columbia University.
Florencia Ruiz Mendoza is from Mexico City. She has been an advocate against forced disappearance for almost twenty years. She initiated her career documenting state crimes for the historical report Qué no Vuelva a Suceder, acknowledged as Patrimony of Memory. She collaborated with the Historical Memory Project at John Jay College/CUNY, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Latin American Network at the International Sites of Conscience. Her literary work has been featured in Los Acentos Review and Restless Immigrants Workshop Blog. She is a reader of color for The Masters Review. She holds a BA in History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and was a Columbia University Human Rights Advocate in 2009 and an Oral History Summer Institute Fellow in 2010. She is currently a student in OHMA.
Learn more about Spring 2023's Oral History and Fiction: A Book Club
Image Description: Book cover of Lost Children Archive, with a maroon, orange, and blue collage of photographs.
These events are open to all. You can use this quick survey to let us know how we could make these events more accessible for you. Note that we are able to provide ASL interpretation for any event, but need two weeks' notice. Please contact Rebecca McGilveray at rlm2203@columbia.edu with specific access requests or questions.