I Am Officially Running for Destaques Literários AILB 2026. In the Self-Help Category. Yes, the Irony.

Parenting abroad bookMaternity Abroad BookKid’s Books
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Let me explain.

I was invited by a coordinator of the Academia Internacional de Literatura Brasileira to run for the Destaques Literários 2026 awards. I am running in two categories: Auto-Ajuda and Crônicas e Contos.

Now. Auto-Ajuda.

I have written an entire post about how I am the author who refuses to fix anything. About how the difference between a problem and an experience is that a problem has a solution and an experience has a name. About how Parenting Unpacked does not promise transformation, it promises recognition, because transformation is something you do yourself over time and no book can do it for you.

And now I am running in the self-help category.

The self-help category is where the reader looking for this book will go first. The parent experiencing the loss of felt competence, who is functioning but not quite like herself, who needs a word for what is happening before she can do anything else about it, she starts in self-help. That is where she looks. The literary fiction shelf and the psychology section come later, if she gets there at all.

And if my book is in that category, she might find it.

The AILB, the Academia Internacional de Literatura Brasileira, is one of the most respected literary institutions for Brazilian authors writing internationally. Being invited is already something and running is the next step.

I am running with Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self for Auto-Ajuda. And with my full body of work, including Maternity Abroad and My First American Coloring Book, for Crônicas e Contos.

I am not going to pretend I am not excited. I absolutely am.

The voting is reserved for members of the Academia Internacional de Literatura Brasileira, so there is nothing to click. But if you want to help me avoid a full vira-lata spiral about whether I deserve to be in this category, leave a comment below. I just needed to tell someone.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

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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