Lost Children Archive
In Lost Children Archive, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.
Great World Texts, an initiative of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is additionally supported by the UW-Madison Libraries; the Evjue Foundation; the Wisconsin Book Festival; the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the Departments of American Indian Studies, History, and English and Creative Writing.
In conversation with Professor Paola Hernández.
Valeria Luiselli
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 the International 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 teaches at Bard College and is a visiting professor at Harvard University.
Paola Hernández
Paola S. Hernández is Mellon-Morgridge Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre and performance as well as Latinx Studies. She has published numerous articles on Southern Cone theatre, US-Mexico border performance and memory politics, sites of memory, human rights, and documentary theatre. She is the author of Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies-Objects-Archives (Northwestern UP, 2021), where she examines the role of the "real"; in theatre and visual arts with an emphasis on contemporary documentary theatre in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. She has also authored El teatro de Argentina y Chile: Globalización, resistencia y desencanto (Corregidor, 2009), and is co-editor (with Analola Santana) of Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre (Routledge, 2022), as well as (with Pamela Brownell) of Biodrama/Proyecto Archivos: seis documentales escénicos by Vivi Tellas (Papeles Teatrales, Universidad de Córdoba, 2017), and of Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives (with Brenda Werth and Florian Becker, Palgrave, 2013). Hernández is currently Director of Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies.