Keila Vall de la Ville

Keila is a New York-based Venezuelan writer. She is the author the novel Los Días Animales (2016), which received the International Latino Book Award for Best Novel in 2018 and was published as The Animal Days (2021) in translation by Robin Myers. She is the author of the short story collection Ana no duerme (2007), finalist in Venezuela’s Concurso Nacional de Autores Inéditos (2006), Ana no duerme y otros cuentos (2016), and Enero es el mes más largo (2021). She has also published the chronicles book De cuando Lola Corre Lola dejó sin aire a Murakami  (2022), and the poetry books Viaje legado (2016) and Perseo en Si bemol (2023), Finalist in the Paz Prize for Poetry-National Poetry Series/Miami Book Fair (2022). She is the editor of the anthologies 102 Poetas, Jamming (2014) and Between the Breath and the Abyss: Poetics on Beauty, a compilation of essays and poems by thirty-three contemporary poets on the subject of Beauty (2021). Vall de la Ville’s work is included in several fiction and non-fiction anthologies, in El Nacional’s Papel Literario, Viceversa Magazine, and Prodavinci among other digital media.

In 2011 she founded the poetry movement Jamming Poético in Caracas. Since 2015 these poetry readings have taken place in New York City, Caracas, Bogotá, and Miami, and online, and more than two hundred authors from different nationalities have taken part in it. Her cultural activism has focused on Venezuelan and US contemporary Hispanic literature, and the advocacy of Spanish-language literature in the US. She is an anthropologist with an MA in Politics from Universidad Simon Bolivar, an MA in Cultural Studies from Columbia University, and an MFA from NYU.  She won a silver medal at the Rock Climbing Pan-American Championships in 1996, and was one of the three climbers of the first all–female attempt to the Mount Roraima.