Is It My Birthday Today?

Parenting abroad bookKid’s BooksMaternity Abroad Book
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Actually it is. Happy 36 to me!!!

But that is not what I am here for today. I woke up to a message from a fellow writer, Renata da Costa, with a screenshot and my name is in the top five of the Destaques Literários 2026 in the Auto-Ajuda category at the Academia Internacional de Literatura Brasileira.

I have not brushed my teeth yet. 🤣🙈

I mean… People looked at my catalogue and voted for me as an author, not for a specific book but for me, the Brazilian woman in Switzerland who wrote three books because she needed the words and could not find them anywhere else. 🤯 it’s mind blowing!

I did not prepare a speech, but if you read any of these books and felt seen, this is yours too.

Parenting Unpacked — Maternity Abroad — My First American Coloring Book

All books are available now on Amazon worldwide. My younger me would be pinching herself right now. Me holding a top five Destaques Literários AILB 2026 nomination, a bestseller badge for Parenting Unpacked on Amazon Brasil on launch month, and an endorsement from Ruth E. Van Reken, co-author of Third Culture Kids. 💛 What a year!

Congratulations to me. 🥹

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Books Maternidade no Exterior, Parenting Unapcked and My First American Coloring Book
Buy MaternityA Abroad
Buy Parenting Unpacked
Buy My First American Coloring Book
Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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I have been thinking about this a lot lately.