Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
“The writing process is very mysterious to me. I’ve never intentionally sat down to write something and then just had moments of discovery. It’s always this moment of deep accessing, and in that accessing is a deep wounding.”
“Villarreal leaps across seemingly insurmountable boundaries in this stunning book of interwoven essays and shattered, artfully reassembled memoir . . . [She] deftly blends her own family’s stories with unique insights into realms like grunge and indie music, Jennifer Lopez rom-coms, the life and death of Selena and the meanings of Game of Thrones.”
“Combining cultural criticism with memoir, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Magical/Realism is that precious sort of essay collection—one that casts a wide lens over a vast subject matter (in this case, “Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders”) but draws insights that feel singular and provocative. Examining colonialism’s impact on imagination, untangling the threads between “fantasy” and “magical realism,” and relaying the impact of fantasy on her own healing, Villareal makes ample use of pop culture: Fans of Star Wars, Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings, Kurt Cobain, and video games will be delighted (and challenged) by her brilliant analysis”
“ ‘Pemi Aguda is a daring writer like no other, with a voice that is unique and powerful. One Leg on Earth is a sharp, funny, bold, nuanced, and utterly absorbing debut I did not know I needed. I will read anything ‘Pemi Aguda writes!”
“A portrait of a woman, a city, and a shared moment in time, and a story about how it feels when the changes in life are intertwined with bigger, scarier changes in the world outside. One Leg on Earth gripped me from the first page.”
“Wildly inventive and odd, but written with surgeonlike precision, these stories herald the arrival of a major voice in speculative fiction.”
“Ghostroots is a gorgeous inflection point in fabulism. Set in Lagos, at the confluence of tradition and wonder, the speculative currents of these stories pull you beneath the surface of contemporary Nigerian society, carrying you to a deeper place where the laws of literary physics no longer apply. ’Pemi Aguda’s razor-sharp collection will haunt you and leaving you feeling unmoored.”
“Aguda’s excellent story collection deserves a wide audience.”
‘Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the author of the story collection Ghostroots (W.W. Norton & Co, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Her next book is the novel One Leg on Earth, forthcoming from W.W Norton & Co in May 2026.
Her short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, and her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine.
In an interview with with Afreada, she was asked how the stories in Ghostroots came about and why they were important to her: “It wasn’t until I had written several of these stories that I started to see they were interested in questions about family, about what we owe ourselves versus what we owe our community, and how we carry the weight of ancestry. Can we exist outside of the context of these ties? Should we? The themes didn’t come first, though. What came first were the “what if?” ideas: What if a last-born son watched a fever kill all the last-born sons on his street, watched death waltz towards him? What happens when a housegirl is kidnapped by a woman with good intentions? While writing into these ideas, my own preoccupations naturally made themselves manifest.”
She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and lives in Philadelphia.
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