About this item
"This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we've been told - and told ourselves - in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we've come to understand as order." - Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West's idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today? In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp - not activists, not the country's growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government.
About the Author
Lauren Markham is a writer and reporter based in Northern California. A fiction writer, essayist and journalist, her work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment and her home state of California. Markham is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Crown, September 2017) . The Far Away Brothers was the winner of the 2018 Ridenhour Book Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and a California Book Award Silver Prize. It was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, a New York Times Book Critics' Top Book of 2017, and was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the L.A. Times Book Award and longlisted for a Pen America Literary Award in Biography. Her essays, fiction and journalism have appeared in outlets such as VQR (where she is aContributing Editor) , Harper's, The Guardian, The New Republic, Guernica, VICE, Mother Jones, Orion, The Atlantic, Lithub, California Sunday, Narrative Magazine, Pacific Standard, and on This American Life. She has been awared fellowships from The Mesa Refuge, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, the McGraw Center, the French American Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. In addition to writing, Markham works as a part time administrator at a high school for immigrant youth in Oakland, California and teaches writing at the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program, Left Margin Lit, and the University of San Francisco.For updates, follow Lauren on Twitter: @LaurenMarkham_