Roberto Lovato’s Unforgetting uses a backdrop of war and immigration to tell the story of his family in El Salvador and Los Angeles. In Desert Notebooks, Ben Ehrenreich draws on his experiences in Joshua Tree National Park and Las Vegas to imagine a better pathway for humanity. Both take us on extraordinary journeys through their worlds. These talented authors and longtime friends, each with a book excerpt in the Winter 2021 issue of Alta, sit down with Alta Live to be in conversation—with each other.
About the authors:
Ben Ehrenreich writes about climate change for the Nation. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, and Los Angeles magazine. In 2011, he was awarded a National Magazine Award. His book The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, based on his reporting from the West Bank, was one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2016. He is also the author of two novels, Ether and The Suitors. Ehrenreich’s latest, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, was published in 2020.
Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and hailed by the paper as a “powerful” nonfiction book and a “groundbreaking memoir.” Newsweek listed the memoir as a “must read” 2020 book, and the Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its 20 Best Books of the year. Lovato is also an educator, journalist, and writer based at the Writers Grotto in San Francisco. As a cofounder of #DignidadLiteraria, he helped build a movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than 60 million Latinx persons left off of bookshelves in the United States and out of the national dialogue. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on numerous issues—violence, terrorism, the drug war, and the refugee crisis—from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, France, and the United States, among other countries.
Check out these links to some of the topics, work, and authors Lovato and Ehrenreich touched on:
- Read an excerpt of Roberto Lovato’s Unforgetting
- Read Talking with Roberto Lovato
- Read an excerpt of Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks
- Read Talking with Ben Ehrenreich
- Read The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh
- Read Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, by Juliana Spahr
- Read The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, by Frances Stonor Saunders
- Read Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism, by Anathea E. Portier-Young
- Find out more about #DignidadLiteraria
