Brescia University Welcomes Author Lauren Markham

Brescia University is proud to welcome author Lauren Markham to campus on Monday, October 21st at 7 PM.  This event will take place in Taylor Lecture Hall and is free and open to the public.  Markham is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Young Migrants and the Making of An American Life, this year’s common read. The common read is part of Brescia University’s First Year Experience program, an academic program designed to assist new students with their transition to college. 

The book follows the story of two twin brothers, Ernesto and Raúl Flores, and their journey to America to flee the violence they were facing in their home country.  Markham follows the brothers through their travels to Texas, through immigration, and to their final destination of California. While showcasing the normal lives teenagers face, it also gives insight into the life that migrants face. Having to navigate a new school and language, the brothers also deal with working to pay down their mounting coyote debt and facing their day in immigration court.

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. 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.

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 York Review of Books, The New Republic, Guernica, Mother Jones, Orion, The Atlantic, Lithub, California Sunday, Narrative Magazine, The Best American Travel Writing 2019, 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.