The New York Review of Books presents a series of online events hosted by Fintan O’Toole. For our second event, New York Review contributors Francisco Cantú, Julia Preston, and Héctor Tobar join O’Toole for a conversation on how the battle for immigration rights affects us all.
Francisco Cantú 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. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, his writing and translations have also been featured in The New Yorker, Best American Essays, Granta, and VQR, as well as on This American Life. A lifelong resident of the Southwest, he now lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona, where he co-coordinates the Field Studies in Writing Program and DETAINED, a community archive that collects oral histories of people who have been incarcerated in for-profit immigration detention centers.
Julia Preston is a journalist focusing on immigration. From 2017 through 2024 she was a Contributing Writer at the Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism organization reporting on criminal justice and immigration. Before joining the Marshall Project, she worked for twenty-one years at The New York Times. She was the national correspondent covering immigration from 2006 through 2016, and a foreign correspondent in Mexico from 1995 through 2001, among other assignments. She is a 2020 winner of an Online Journalism Award for Explanatory Reporting, for a Marshall Project series on myths about immigration and crime. She won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs, for a series by four New York Times reporters on drug corruption in Mexico. She was awarded the 1997 Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America. She is the author, with Samuel Dillon, of Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy, 2004, which recounts Mexico’s transformation from an authoritarian state into a struggling democracy.
Héctor Tobar is the author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” and the novel The Last Great Road Bum, among other books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction and a Professor of Literary Journalism at the University of California, Irvine.
About this series
The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues of the second Trump administration. In each conversation The New York Review‘s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk to a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including the rule of law, immigration, the state of the left, and the fate of the climate. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.
