Luisa Valenzuela

Luisa Valenzuela was born and currently resides in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1979  Valenzuela moved to New York City, where she has been a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 1982. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow (1983), a Fullbright Fellow, and is also a graduate of the International Writers' Program, Iowa City, (1970).
  
Valenzuela has been Writer in Residence at Columbia University, the Center for Interamerican Relations, New York University and Universidad de Puerto Rico in Mayaguez. She has also taught Latin American Literatura, and for many years conducted a creative writing workshop at New York University (Department of English).

Most of her books have been translated into English: the short story collections Open Door, The Censors and Symmetries, and the novels Clara, He who Searches, The Lizard's Tail, Black Novel (with Argentines) and Bedside Manners (Realidad Nacional desde la Cama) which was informed by the experience of returning to her native Buenos Aires in 1989.  Strange Things Happen Here (a collection of short stories and a novel, 1979) was exhibited in the American Century exhibition, cultural sites, at the Whitney Museum, New York, 2000.

Valenzuela's most recent books are La Travesia (a novel), Peligrosas Palabras (essays) Escritura y Secreto  (essays),  Los deseos oscuros y los otros (The New York Diaries). She is currently working on a new novel, El Manana.

''Luisa Valenzuela explores the terrain where love and violence, erotic pleasure and death, exist perilously close to each other...Valenzuela plays with words, turns them inside out, weaves them into sensuous webs.'' - The Village Voice.

''Luisa Valenzuela is the heiress of Latin American fiction. She wears an oppulent, baroque crown, but her feet are naked.'' - Carlos Fuentes.
           
www.luisavalenzuela.com