Luciany Aparecida

Luciany Aparecida was born in 1982 in Jaguaquara, in the Jequiriçá Valley of Bahia, Brazil. She was raised in a rural community called Charco in rural Irajuba, and municipality of Santa Inês, Bahia.^[6][7] Her mother, Luci Iara Vieira Alves, had complications during labor and was wrongly declared deceased. During the false alarm, her cousin Nilza named the surviving child Aparecida, and then Luci recovered. So, the name Luciany Aparecida came from the combination of her mother's name and Our Lady, to whom the miracle is attributed.^[8]

Until she was five years old, Aparecida was raised in her grandparents' home, alongside her mother, seven aunts, and six uncles. Being surrounded by adults, the elderly, and various forms of media, Luciany heard many stories and ideas from her family and those around her. However, at age five, her grandmother, Maria Ruth Vieira, took her to Santa Inês, where they lived alone for Luciany to go to school and receive a better education than what was available in Charco. ^[8]

"My word has a geography and it will always be what we pretend is the Northeast, it will always have women, older women, and tensions regarding race and the patriarchy... I was raised by an old woman, so I head very old stories, the ones from the grandmothers of my grandmother, of my great- and great-great-grandmothers from the 19th century... When my grandmother's friends began to die, I realized that I had lived with a different generation than what my friends had experienced. I did not coexist with my mother's generation, rather with women in their 60s and 70s." ^[8]

Until she was 19 years old, Luciany and Maria only visited Charco when they had a break from school, but Aparecida was learning skills that would later serve her writing. She published the first 200 copies of one of her first novels, Ezequiel, in an artisenal fashion, hand-sewing each one. ^[8]

On November 27, 2025, she became engaged to author and translator Natalia Borges Polesso. ^[9]

Aparecida completed her undergraduate education in Vernacular Letters at the State University of Feira de Santana (UEFS) in 2007, and her Master's (2011) and Doctorate (2015) degrees in Letters from the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB).^[10] Under the scope of literary criticism, the author's studies emphasize literary theory, contemporary literature, and the intersectionality between history, memory, ancestrality, afro-diasporic culture, immigration, nationality, and performances. Her doctorate thesis received the evaluation "approved with distinction" due to her study of Poemário Modelosvivos (2010), by Ricardo Aleixo.^[11] Currently, she works at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUCSP) as a Doctorate Professor in the Graduate Program of Literature and Literary Criticism.^[12]

Aside from being a professor, Aparecida is a prolific author who writes under various pennames about topics like colonial violence, patriarchy, and gender issues. She has stated she intends to pull readers from their comfort zones: "the author hopes, deliberately, to discomfort us from our possible places of normalization of toxic masculinity and of racism, technologies of power that operate on the maintenance of colonizer mindsets which have not been annihilated from the country." ^[8] Aparecida's works serve as activist messages for the afro-brazilian, LGBTQ+, and feminist communities.

She also participates in various forums, interviews, and other media appearances to promote both her literature and her activism and especially the combination of the two. Thus, she removes herself from the limits of one sole platform and places herself in front of academic and social students alike. ^[13][14]