Join USC Annenberg for special guest, journalist and Hearst Fellow Michelle García in conversation with Professor Sandy Tolan.

For over 10 years, Michelle García has investigated the intersection of national identity, race and of the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has uncovered the powerful influence of border mythology in shaping news coverage and public policy on the border and in the “drug war.” In her presentation, García shares insights and experiences from reporting on the construction of the border wall, the violence in Mexico, and the most recent crisis on the border, real and imagined.

Michelle García is a New York and Texas-based journalist and essayist and a current Soros Equality Fellow and Hearst Visiting Fellow at USC's Annenberg School.  She is the 2019 recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship through The University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Bill Lane Center for the American West media fellowship at Stanford University. She is the curator and editor of Re/Writing West: Dispatches from a Borderless Nation, to be published in Jan. 2019.  Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Oxford American, Guernica, The Texas Observer, Columbia Journalism Review, The Atlantic’s Quartz, Insight Crime, NACLA, the Baffler, Salon, The Nation, AlJazeera America, among other publications. García is working on a non-fiction book about borders and their powerful influence on U.S. identity, politics and culture of violence. Follow her at @pistoleraprod

Lunch will be served.