Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
(she/her) Guest/Teaching Artist
With the publication of her debut book, The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio became the first undocumented finalist for a National Book Award. Her book was also named by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020 and was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Time, NPR, The LA Times, The New York Public Library, Book Riot, Vulture, and the Library Journal. The Undocumented Americans is also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for best first book. Karla has written about immigration, music, beauty, and mental illness for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, n+1, and The New Inquiry, among others. A graduate of Harvard University and a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at Yale, Karla lives in New Haven with her partner and their dog. She is a Fellow at the Emerson Collective.