Hello and welcome to meet the Writers.
This following conversation was recorded at the Lannan Literary Festival at Georgetown University in Washington.
My guest is a fiction writer, an essayist, and a journalist.
Her work most often concerns issues related to youth migration,
the environment, and her home state of California.
In addition to writing,
she's spent 15 years working at the intersection of education and immigration.
She teaches writing at the Ashland University MFA and Writing Program and the University of San Francisco.
Her latest book is A Map of Future Ruins on Borders and Belonging.
Lauren Markham, welcome to meet the writers.
Thank you so much.
It's really nice to be here.
We're actually speaking in Washington, D.C. where we're at the Lannan Centre Literary Festival,
which has just been fabulous so far.
And we're going to be talking today, in fact,
about A Map of Future Ruins on Borders and Belongings, which is your most recent book.
It's been called a remarkable, unnerving and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.
And of course, immigration, migration,
youth issues is where you've spent a lot of your working life.
But I want to go right back to the beginning for you to tell me about your family,