2024 transforming care conference keynote speaker
Alejandro Varela
“We’re all pieces in a massive puzzle. The work that came before us allows us to see the picture with more clarity, but the work continues until every piece is in place. Our liberation has to be collective in order to be complete and long-lasting. It’s an honor to participate in an event that celebrates and upholds the tradition of health with dignity and equity.”
Alejandro Varela is a National Book Award Finalist and an important literary voice for our time. A public health storyteller, his fictional work looks at the real-life impact of racism, income inequality, class conflict, gentrification, sexuality, and heterosexism. One reviewer wrote that Varela’s stories “dispense uncomfortable truths that everyone thinks about but won’t address out loud.”
The child of immigrant Salvadoran and Colombian parents, Varela grew up in a small, working-class town on Long Island. As a youth, he often had to translate complex subjects for his Spanish-speaking family. This sparked an interest in language and in connecting people to one another and ideas. Varela went on to get a master’s degree in public health and worked as a cancer researcher at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He also began to write fiction to raise awareness of public health issues.
“Studying public health helped me to see our society’s failings clearly, and more importantly, it helped me to see the paths for improving it,” he said. His background in public health and experiences as a queer person of color living in a highly gentrified part of New York City, gave him plenty of material for his writing.
His debut novel, The Town of Babylon, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a nominee for the PEN America Open Book Award. This coming-of-age story looks at race, sexuality, class identity, and the need for the book’s main character, a gay Latinx professor, to confront his past. One reviewer described it as “a finely-crafted literary scalpel with two edges, one that cuts through the layers of a dying body politic and another that clears arteries blocking the way to the heart of personal and political health: community.”
Varela’s second novel, The People Who Report More Stress, is a collection of interconnected short stories that blend humor and social commentary to show how race, class, and difference impact and shape relationships. The New York Times called it “a master class in analyzing the unspoken.”
Varela’s writing and presentations focus on the intersections of public health and fiction, the need for more queer love stories in literature, and the lens through which he sees the world. He holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Washington, with a concentration in Community-Oriented Public Health Practice (COPHP). He taught graduate-level classes in policy advocacy and undergraduate courses in nursing and in public health and film at Long Island University.
His work has appeared in The Point Magazine, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, The New Republic, and The Offing. Varela is an editor-at-large of Apogee Journal, a New York-based literary magazine that engages with identity politics, including race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability.