Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is an Ecuadorian-American author and essayist whose debut book The Undocumented Americans, published in 2020, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and is widely recognized as one of the most important and original works of reportage about undocumented immigrant life in the United States. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States as a small child, Villavicencio grew up undocumented in New York City and was among the first recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program after its introduction in 2012.

She became the first undocumented student to publicly write about her status at Harvard, publishing a 2011 piece in The Harvard Crimson under a pseudonym. She went on to earn her B.A. from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her academic work and journalism have consistently centered the lives and voices of those on the margins of American society.

The Undocumented Americans travels to communities across the country — Staten Island, Flint, Hialeah, Cleveland, and New Haven — to report on the hidden lives of undocumented people. Written in a voice that is intimate, angry, tender, and formally experimental, the book refuses the conventions of trauma journalism and victim narrative, instead demanding that undocumented Americans be seen in the full complexity of their humanity. It has been praised for its originality of form and its moral urgency.

Villavicencio has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and other publications. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and has been recognized as one of the most vital young writers working in American nonfiction. Her second book, The Undocumented Americans in paperback, continues to find new readers in high school and college classrooms.