Louise Stern

Louise Stern (born 1978) is an American writer and artist, and works around ideas of language, communication and isolation. Stern grew up in an exclusively deaf community and is fourth-generation deaf on her father's side, and third-generation deaf on her mother's side. She attended California School for the Deaf, Fremont. Literature Her first collection of short stories, Chattering, was published by Granta in 2011. Alan Warner called it "an amazing debut: vibrantly perceptive, gentle, funny and profound". Her first novel, Ismael and His Sisters, was written and set in a deaf village in the Yucatán Peninsula, where Stern communicated in Mayan Sign Language. There will be an accompanying book of photographs to it.