Lauren Markham is a writer and the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), which was awarded the Ridenhour Prize and the California Book Award Silver Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Orion, and Harper’s. In addition to writing, she has spent more than a decade working in the intersection of immigration and education. At the Mesa, Lauren wrote write about turn of the century California—investigating the pernicious myth and making of California, and its role in our national consciousness then and now.