Tragic Borders

A boat capsizes off the coast of Greece. Hundreds drown. Survivors cling to debris, to each other, to the fragile idea that someone, somewhere, is watching. For a moment, the world does. Then it moves on. The conditions that produced the shipwreck, including war, policy, climate, the tightening of borders, do not. They persist; they accumulate.

In A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis, a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the California Book Award, journalist Jeanne Carstensen reconstructs one catastrophic day in 2015 with devastating precision. In conversation with climate change and migration writer Lauren Markham, she will explore the extent to which these crossings are not accidents but outcomes. As war spreads in the Middle East, seas rise, and landscapes become unlivable, more people will be forced to leave their homes. Who is rescued, who is turned away, who disappears—these are not foregone conclusions but the result of decisions, systems, and the stories we choose to tell. This conversation does not look away. It asks what it means to witness and what it costs to keep calling this state of affairs a crisis instead of a pattern.

Jeanne Carstensen is an award-winning journalist. A Greek Tragedy is a finalist for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a California Book Award. Jeanne's work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The World, The Nation, Salon, Nautilus, and The Global Post. She reported on the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and Turkey with support from the Pulitzer Center and has received fellowships from the Logan Nonfiction Program, Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program, and Mesa Refuge. She lives in San Francisco.

Lauren Markham is a writer based in Northern California and the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Riverhead, 2024), and Immemorial (Transit, 2025). The Far Away Brothers won the Ridenhour Book Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and a California Book Award Silver Prize, and was named a New York Times Book Critics’ Top Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books, among other outlets. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.

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