Authors Eileen Truax and Lauren Markham in Conversation on the Issues Surrounding Immigration with Ian Gordon
Authors Eileen Truax and Lauren Markham in Conversation with Ian Gordon

We Built the Wall (Verso)

Eileen Truax

We Built the Wall follows the gripping stories of people like Saúl Reyes, forced to flee his home after a drug cartel murdered several members of his family, and Delmy Calderón, a forty-two-year-old woman leading an eight-woman hunger strike in an El Paso detention center. Truax tracks the heart-wrenching trials of refugees like Yamil, the husband and father who chose a prison cell over deportation to Mexico, and Rocío Hernández, a nineteen-year-old who spent nearly her entire life in Texas and is now forced to live in a city where narcotraffickers operate with absolute impunity. This immersive, engrossing book offers an uncompromising account of the new immigration wars.

BIO

Originally from Mexico, Eileen Truax is a journalist and immigrant currently living in Los Angeles. She contributes regularly to Hoy Los Angeles and Unidos and writes for Latin American publications including Proceso, El Universal, and Gatopardo. Truax often speaks at colleges and universities about the Dreamer movement and immigration.

The Faraway Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Broadway Books)

Lauren Markham

Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores—until, at age seventeen, a deadly threat from the region’s brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they’ve ever known. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA.  With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience.

This book recently won the California Book Awards (Silver-Nonfiction) and the Northern California Book Awards (Creative Non-fiction)

 BIO

Lauren Markham’s essays, fiction and journalism have appeared in outlets such as VQR (where she is a Contributing Editor), Harper's, The New Yorker.com, The Guardian, The New Republic, Guernica, VICE, Mother Jones, Orion, The Atlantic, California Sunday, Narrative Magazine, Pacific Standard, and on This American Life. In addition to writing, she works at a high school for immigrant youth in the Bay Area and teaches writing at the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program, Left Margin Lit, and University of San Francisco.