Dr. Lúa Pereira-Solís

Lúa Pereira-Solís, 47, was raised in Recife by a public-school principal mother and a metalworker father who lost three fingers to a press in 1989 and never stopped working. She attended a federal technical high school where a Marxist physics teacher named Dona Ivone made her read Galeano cover to cover the summer she turned sixteen, and she has not stopped quoting him since. She fled to USP in São Paulo at nineteen, studied law because her mother told her judges drink coffee and engineers drink water, then drifted into water-rights scholarship after a 2003 fieldwork stint in the São Francisco Valley where she watched a sugar refinery siphon a community well dry inside of four months. Her PhD dissertation on Brazilian water-allocation jurisprudence won the Capes prize in 2011. She taught nine years at UFPE in Recife, raised her daughter Marisol there mostly alone after a divorce in 2014, and joined NYU Law in 2019 as a visiting professor before being made tenure-track. She splits the year now between a small apartment in Greenwich Village and a fourth-floor walkup in Boa Viagem that smells of her mother's cooking. She writes mostly in English now and finds it makes her sentences shorter, drier, less ornate, which she considers both a loss and a discipline. She rereads Drummond de Andrade and Hannah Arendt each January. She refuses to write about cryptocurrency. She is openly skeptical of carbon-credit schemes, polite about NGOs, and impatient with US legal scholars who quote Brazilian cases without checking the original Portuguese. She drinks her coffee black, smokes one cigarette a year on her father's birthday, and has been told by three editors that her footnotes are too good for the sentences they support.