Virtual Author Event: Shanthi Sekaran and "Lucky Boy"

About the Book

Eighteen years old and fizzing with optimism, Solimar Castro-Valdez embarks on a perilous journey across the Mexican border. Weeks later, she arrives in Berkeley, California, dazed by first love found then lost, and pregnant. This was not the plan. Undocumented and unmoored, Soli discovers that her son, Ignacio, can become her touchstone, and motherhood her identity in a world where she’s otherwise invisible.

Kavya Reddy has created a beautiful life in Berkeley, but then she can’t get pregnant and that beautiful life seems suddenly empty. When Soli is placed in immigrant detention and Ignacio comes under Kavya’s care, Kavya finally gets to be the singing, story-telling kind of mother she dreamed of being. But she builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else’s child. 

“Nacho” to Soli, and “Iggy” to Kavya, the boy is steeped in love, but his destiny and that of his two mothers teeters between two worlds as Soli fights to get back to him. Lucky Boy is a moving and revelatory ode to the ever-changing borders of love.

About the Author

Shanthi Sekaran
Novelist
Television Writer

Shanthi Sekaran is a novelist and television writer. Her novel, Lucky Boy, was named an Indie Next Great Read, an Amazon Editor's Pick and a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Barnes & Noble, Library Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Rumpus, Salon.com and Canteen Magazine. Her forthcoming middle grade novel, The Samosa Rebellion  (Harper Collins) will be out in Fall 2021. She recently left a teaching career to join the writers' room of the acclaimed NBC medical drama, "New Amsterdam". 

About the Moderator

Paula M.L. Moya
Incoming Director of the Stanford Center for Comparative Studes in Race & Ethnicity
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English
Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education

Moya is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002), and has co-edited three collections of original essays; Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006), and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000).

Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, American cultural studies, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicanx and Latinx studies.

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