CAMPUS READ - Key Persons
CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown (the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for fiction), and the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents.
Francisco Cantú was as an agent for the United States Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012, working in the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. A native of the Southwest, the son of a park ranger and grandson of a Mexican immigrant, Cantú's history, upbringing and career path were deep-rooted in the border. His experiences on both sides of the line unmask a raw, nuanced perspective on migration and America's borders.
He is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. A former Fulbright fellow, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award and an Art for Justice fellowship. His writing and translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Best American Essays, Harper's, and Guernica, as well as on This American Life. A lifelong resident of the Southwest, he now lives in Tucson, where he coordinates the Field Studies in Writing Program at the University of Arizona.
THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER: Dispatches from the Border , pu blished by Riverhead Books, presents a first-person narrative by author and former Border Patrol agent Francisco Cantú. The border between the United States and Mexico is in his blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú became an agent for the United States Border Patrol in 2008, working in the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. He and his partners were posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learned to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They hauled in the dead and delivered to detention those they found alive. Plagued by nightmares, Cantú abandoned the Border Patrol for civilian life in 2012. But when an immigrant friend traveled to Mexico to visit his dying mother and did not return, Cantú discovered that the border had migrated with him.
Job Titles:
- Vice President, Editorial Director for Riverhead
Tara Westover was 17 the first time she stepped into a classroom. Her parents' distrust of the government was so strong, she didn't have a birth certificate. They chose to homeschool their children but Tara received little education outside of the Book of Mormon. From an early age, she and her siblings spent most of their days working in the family salvage yard. Her inspirational story of educating herself to take the SATs, enrolling in Brigham Young University, and going on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University is one designed to spark a conversation about what it means to educated.
Watch Clemantine Wamariya's Ted Talk. First alone and then in pairs, answer the four questions she poses at the end.