An Interview with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

In this episode, we sit down with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of The Undocumented Americans and Catalina, which was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Awards. Cornejo Villavicencio opens up about her experience with meeting readers for the first time and how the unpredictability of the publishing world has shaped her perspective. She also discusses the process of recording Catalina’s audiobook and how it led to her connecting with the novel in a deeper, more personal way.

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Libro.fm: 2024, it’s been a massive year for you. Catalina was released just a couple of months ago and is already a bestseller, so congratulations. And then the announcement came out that it was longlisted for the National Book Awards. Can you walk us through your year?

Karla: My book came out in July and I had a book tour over the summer. I went to I think 11 different cities. It was my first time really going around the United States, outside of the eastern, sort of the Northeast.

It was my first time meeting my readers. My first book came out in March 2020, so right at the start of lockdown. I’ve been writing and doing events for the past four years, but not in person really. So it was my first time seeing my readers and it was really sweet. I have a lot of young readers. I have a lot of readers who don’t normally consider themselves big readers, and that makes me really excited because I remember being little and getting a book from the library and then going home and just excitedly devouring it. And the idea that in 2024 with all of these distractions, all of these exciting apps and everything, the idea that young people are reading novels is amazing and I think that they’re all amazing nerds and I’m really happy that they come to a book event.

Libro.fm: What was it like to find out that Catalina had been longlisted for the National Book Awards?

Karla: It was exciting. I mean, the truth is that it sort of lulled me into a minor depression. I think that’s how these things happen. One thing is that my first book had such an unpredictable journey. When I wrote it, I didn’t know that anybody was going to read it, and that allowed me a lot of liberty and a lot of freedom writing it. It sort of was published under an unlucky star and COVID and all of that, but it had its own journey. But the book was almost shelved by the original publishers. They didn’t really like it. When the book, once it did have its journey and it was celebrated, I think it taught me a little bit about how unpredictable publishing can be and how unpredictable feedback can be, so I’m trying to keep my head down and focus on my writing because if I pay a little too much attention to outside forces like that, I imagine I’m just going to be led astray. It’s so unpredictable.

Libro.fm: How did recording the audiobook change how you see the story and what do you think comes across differently in the audio as opposed to the print copy?

Karla: I think you can tell that it’s a character. When I’m reading it, you can tell I think the little bit of a separation between the author and the character. I intentionally made it a little bit confusing. We have very similar kind of autobiographical backstories. We both went to Harvard, grew up undocumented, grew up in New York, and I wanted there to be just enough of those similarities that I could play with what the first person means and with autofiction and all of that. But hearing myself read it, I was delighted by Catalina. I was frustrated by Catalina. Sometimes I’d read a line that she said and I would be like, “Oh my God, why would you say that?” It really allowed me to experience the book a little bit. Like I was at a PTA conference or at a student-teacher conference and I was here to speak with Catalina, and I was just like, “She did what?”

About our guest

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is an Ecuadorian-American writer and the author of The Undocumented Americans and Catalina. Catalina was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. Her work, which focuses on race, culture, and immigration, has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Elle, Interview, and on NPR.

Audiobooks by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Audiobooks we discussed