Boston Book Festival 2019

Behind the rhetoric and the policy, the story of American immigration is made up of countless tales of individuals and families. Few of their journeys here were easy; neither, in many cases, was the process of adjusting to a new culture. But all of these stories are fascinating, important, and worthy of being told. In this session, we’ll hear from two writers who craft immigration narratives in their recent fiction. Inspired in part by her own family history, Juliet Grames’s novel The Seven or Eight Lives of Stella Fortuna follows the twentieth-century journey of its title character from her native Calabria to Hartford, Connecticut, in a story that, according to the Washington Post, “brings to life a woman that time and history would have ignored.” In The Water Diviner and Other Stories, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer follows the varied experiences of Sri Lankan immigrants to the United States, confronting prejudice, bullying, suspicion, and changing self-perceptions in the wake of shifting economic class and changing professional identities. Our host for what’s sure to be a perceptive and timely conversation is Danielle Legros Georges, director of Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.