Feeling Like An Immigrant (In-Person)
Fall (14 hours or more) | Registration opens 7/29/2025 12:00 AM EDT
“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” So author Luis Alberto Urrea describes one cost of changing homelands. We’ll explore the lives of individuals caught up in the process of immigrating to the US or arriving as refugees.
Mexican American Pulitzer Prize winner Urrea introduces a sprawling Mexican family living in the U.S. with roots firmly planted in Mexico in his 2018 novel The House of Broken Angels, an epic tale moving between generations and borders. Pakistani Syed Masood’s novel The Bad Muslim Discount takes us from Pakistan and Iraq to California through the story of two immigrant families in a romp that is by equal measure hysterically funny and painful. Finally, another Pulitzer winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, tells stories of Vietnamese refugees in his short story collection, The Refugees.
These three authors make it possible to feel like an immigrant. Examining the lives of their characters, we’ll tackle the questions of just what it takes to make America a new home.
Short lectures to set context, but we’ll emphasize discussion.
Required Books:
The House of Broken Angels - Luis Albert Urrea (ISBN-13: 978-0316154895)
The Bad Muslim Discount - Sayed M. Masood ISBN-13: 978-1984897411)
The Refugees - Viet Thanh Nguyen (ISBN-13: 978-0802127365)
Toni Egger
Toni Egger taught English literature and theater at Phillips Academy and Sidwell Friends School in her salad days. She spent the next thirty years in television, writing and producing for National Geographic and developing programs for Discovery Communications. Egger spent a decade trying to be a farmer in Rappahannock County, VA and then retired to the Upper Valley. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Virginia.