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Lauren Markham is a writer based in Northern California. She is the author of the recent A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging which The New Yorker listed as one of “The Best Books We’ve Read in 2024 So Far” and which Kirkus reviews called “a remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.” 

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’s first book, The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Crown, 2017) 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. 

Markham has reported from the border regions of Greece and Mexico and Thailand and Texas; from arctic Norway; from gang-controlled regions of El Salvador; from depopulating towns in rural Sardinia and rural Guatemala, too; from home school havens in southern California; from imperiled forests in Oregon and Washington; from the offices of overwhelmed immigration attorneys in L.A. and Tijuana; from the upscale haunts of women scammed on the Upper East Side. 

Her writing has appeared in outlets such as VQR (where she is a contributing editor), Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Guernica, Freeman's, Mother Jones, Orion, The Atlantic, Lit Hub, California Sunday, Zyzzyva, The Georgia Review, The Best American Travel Writing 2019, and on This American Life. She has been awarded fellowships from The Mesa Refuge, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, the McGraw Center, the French American Foundation, the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Silvers Prize, the de Groot Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. 

In addition to writing, Markham has spent fifteen years working at the intersection of education and immigration. She regularly teaches writing in various community writing centers as well as at the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program, the University of San Francisco and St. Mary’s MFA in Writing Program. Her third book, Immemorial, will be published by Transit Books in 2025. 

Synopsis

The SUU Eccles APEX presentation on October 10 featured Journalist and Writer Lauren Markham. Her presentation was titled “The Myth of the Border”.

Lauren Markham recently released her book, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. In her presentation, she discussed A Map of Future Ruins as well as her first book, The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Markham has reported across the globe; from Greece, Mexico, Thailand, and more. 

Markham began her presentation posing the question of how we narrate stories of the past and migration, as well as how a factual story becomes, over time, a myth. She questioned in what ways are borders determined by the stories we tell of the past, and how many U.S. American families of European descent narrate a migration story of valor and ease. 

Markham emphasized movement and belonging, connecting that to what she had experienced visiting the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island Lesvos. She described Moria as “a human rights graveyard”, and shared some harrowing details about the camp. She said the Moria was initially built to house 2,500, then 3,500, and that at one point there were more than 20,000 people living in and around the camp. She shared that many of the refugees in Moria are waiting for asylum to progress in the courts and that inhabitants of the refugee camp were maybe given a tent or a tarp and told to stay there. 

Markham shared a story of an unfortunate fire that burned down most of the refugee camp in September of 2020. 6 Afghan boys were arrested—despite little evidence—for the crime, which Markham described as, “an example of miscarriage of justice” and that they “needed someone to blame, it’s useful to use the profile of a newcomer to blame”. Markham broadened to a global perspective, saying that “global governments are creating narratives about immigrants”.

Markham candidly shared her passion and desire around migrants, borders, and refugees, stating that “borders are a mechanism of storytelling”. Markham said she has a “desire to understand the past, as well as the stories of our present”, and placed emphasis on “the mythology of the past versus the present and future”. Markham stated that in a lot of cases, the idea is that “there is a more perfect past and we need to get there, which is often an imaginary idea”. 

Markham connected all that to her fascination with Greece as an origin story, and how migration has seemingly become a crime. She wrestled with the question of “how do we, at times wilfully, misunderstand the past? And what are the consequences today?”. Markham stated that “how we understand the past directly influences border violence and exclusion”, and that even though a large part of the argument today around migration is ‘perceived differences’, that “we’ve always been neighbors with people that have perceived differences”. 
 

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