Mesa alums Jeanne Carstensen and Roberto Lovato discuss Jeanne’s award winning book A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis

On October 28, 2015, a boat meant for only a few dozen passengers capsized off the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. Hundreds of refugees, forced in desperation onto the overloaded boat manned by armed smugglers, were tossed into a roiling sea. The resulting loss of life, the largest in a single day during the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, shocked the world.

After nearly a decade of research and interviews, investigative reporter Jeanne Carstensen has captured every detail of the dramatic twenty-four hours. This includes the recollections of the refugees’ lives before they left their homes and a full account of the courageous rescue efforts of the Greek islanders and volunteers rushing to help, even as their government and the EU failed to act. In this remarkable narrative feat, Carstensen brilliantly showcases the extraordinary heroism of ordinary people in extreme circumstances.

In a world where forced migration is on the rise, and where standing up to protect our neighbors can come at great personal risk, A Greek Tragedy challenges us to confront our collective humanity. This unforgettable testament of our times is “a crushing account of a senseless tragedy” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and a compassionate depiction of the lengths to which a person will go to save another human being.

Silver Medal Winner in nonfiction for the 95th Annual California Book Awards 

2026 Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

Jeanne Carstensen is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in New York Times, Foreign Policy, The World, The Nation, Salon, Nautilus, and Global Post, among other outlets. She covered the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and Turkey with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and was short-listed for the Immigration Journalism Awards. Jeanne has been awarded fellowships at the Logan Nonfiction Program and National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. Previously, she was managing editor of Salon and The Bay Citizen, which produced the Bay Area pages of New York Times. Jeanne was the Peter Barnes Long-Form Journalism Fellow at Mesa Refuge in 2021.

Roberto Lovato is an award-winning journalist, and the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, a “groundbreaking” memoir the New York Times picked as an “Editor’s Choice.” Newsweek listed Roberto’s memoir as a “must read” 2020 book while the Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its 20 Best Books of 2020. He is also an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Guernica, Le Monde Diplomatique, La Opinion, Der Spiegel and other national and international media outlets. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, he has reported on numerous issues—violence, terrorism, the drug war and the refugee crisis—from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France and the United States, among other countries. Roberto was a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at Mesa Refuge in 2025.