Author Talk: Lauren Markham in conversation with Julie Flynn Siler

Migration and social justice reporter Lauren Markham presents her newest book A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. Her synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay traces a broad narrative of migration, from global history to myth, rooted in the story of the 2020 Moria Camp fire that devestated one of Europe’s largest refugee camps. A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration can explain our history, and also predict our future.

“In this brilliant, timely meditation, Markham explores how the stories we tell about borders and who belongs can harden our hearts or help to open them. The threads she follows weave a tapestry as moving as it is illuminating.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. A US American of Greek heritage, she has been working with migrants for two decades, and writing about migration and other social issues in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in Berkeley, CA.

Julie Flynn Siler is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a finalist for a California Book Award. She is also the author of the bestselling nonfiction books, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, and The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty among others.

Sausalito Books by the Bay will be the bookseller for this event.

Photo credit: Ben Gucciardi