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 the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and 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 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 McSweeney's, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a Writer in Residence at Bard College and lives in New York City.  

The Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence Program brings renowned woman writers to the Tulane campus. Coordinated through the Newcomb Institute, the Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence program was established by Dana Zale Gerard, NC ‘85, and made possible by an annual gift from the M.B. and Edna Zale Foundation of Dallas, Texas. Since 2006, the program has been generously supported by Barnes & Noble College Booksellers. In 2010, the program became fully endowed through a gift from Martha McCarty Kimmerling, NC’63, and known as the Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence program.