Welcome, everyone to the seventh annual festival which is the Signature Program of the Public Library foundation. My name is abby and i run the project up the Columbia Journalism School and im thrilled to be here today with our prizewinners steve luxembourg and helen thorpe. Before i give a formal introduction to the panelists, i want to encourage the attendees to share your experience on social media using the hash tag both fast and there will be a signing of the books at the end of this session at the barnes and noble tend. There will be time to ask the authors to request an. Please join me in welcoming the work in progress winners. The author of separate the story of plessy versus ferguson from slavery and segregation, which has been called absorbing and a story that was written with energy and elegance and i can confirm that myself. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed a journey into a family secret. A longtime editor of the Washington Post he was the 2016 lucas work in progress winner. Joining him is how when thorpe who was born in one and irish pair in and she is the author of the new comers finding refuge and hope in an american classroom which was described as a delicate and heartbreaking mystery story. Shes a journalist and author of the books just like us and soldier girls we host several journalism awards and one of them is the j. Lucas and the project where every year we givt to 25,000dollar prizes today the completion of significant works of nonfiction on the topics of american political or social concern. This was conceived as a way of closing the gap between that time and money and author has an time and money finishing a book requires. You can tell us a little bit about the challenges and opportunities that have been when you begin on such a journey of writing a book. In speaking with you, you say the case matters mor taste mattw more than ever. Its a significant thing people should know about and im curious. Is a vague notion, raise your hand because i had a notion myself until reading this book i recommend it to you. So, would you mind recapping briefly what was in that case, what it meant and what it means to us today . Is a case that is synonymous with separate but equal by the seven to one Supreme Court ruled the separatiothat the separatioa violation of the cushions the you might ask where those words came from the language in the law that required a separate Railroad Cars with equal but separate. How many people here you say you know something about the case, how many people here know what the race was . Was he black, white . I dont think we should talk about people by their percentage but he was probably more one quarter but they wanted to make him look as white as possible because he was fair skinned enough to cause confusion and they wanted to argue they were responsible to tell the passengers race in the which many of you know how were they going to enforce the law. How do they know where they were from the north and south. I. And the attendant or income accumulation. For the people of color to catch up. You in your book write about your experience spending a year in a classroom with a group of 22 students immigrant and refugee children learning english together in a classroom. Tell us the story how you ended up with this incredible access to these kids . It was unexpected and a surprise to me. Previously i had written a book about some students growing up in Denver Colorado where i live and you might not know if you are not living in colorado, but near denver, like many big urban cities is the most diverse places that you can find and 42 of the students are english language learners these days and we have plenty of undocumented students, so i followed a couple of documented students through high school and through college, six years total to see what it was like to come of age without legal status and after that book, i was trying to explore the subject of refugees because so many families were being displaced around the world, and i showed up at the high school and in are called South High School which is a place that has the largest concentration of refugees and asylum seeking students in our school system. I was trying to do a background interview and she was kind of a force of nature, a visionary principle, and about 20 minutes into the conversation, she said id read your first book, why dont you sit any classroom you want and you will be welcome to spend as much time as you want. She ultimately invited me to spend a full year inside the school and it didnt occur to me to ask to be inside the school because it isnt something journalists are usually permitted to do. But earlier tha this summer, ths was august, 2015. Donald trump has announced he was going to run for president and she was a passionate of the refugee and immigrant students in her building. And i think she believed the stories would just melt peoples hearts if only they understood the journeys of these kids that they were living through and shouldering and how resilient they were and funny and strong and smart and astonishing and full of potential. So, i think that it was a larger political context that led her to invite me into the building. And then the challenge was to handle the situation well because being given so much access to kids who are not yet apples got a vulnerable time in their lives as they are transitioning the United States i think was it presented me with some challenges. Telchallenges. Tell us about that. Well, i think we have been chatting offline about being others and i have a 15yearold student, 16yearold now and i think you have a child or not the same age, and it is about how old most of the kids in this room were. I would hate if somebody, a journalist showed up in my sons classroom and started asking him questions in the middle of this with a baby things that might be hard or difficult for him. I was aware if i did that with these students, that it would be wrong. And that is a little counterintuitive for a journalist to not ask questions. So, i saw my job really is taking the opportunity to be in the room and welcoming whatever the students wanted to share with me, but getting the most i could to convey to them exactly who i was even though there were 14 languages and five alphabets represented in the students population in the classroom and so it was actually very hard for me to explain that i hired 14 interpreters and told them who i was and said if they wanted to share their story and so many of the kids really wanted to do that they wanted to help america understand the rest of the world and who they were in some of the things being said about them were wildly untrue. If they wanted to share their story that i asked if they would invite me how to meet their parents and their parent could make that decision, not that the students would make the decision on her own or his own. You didnt show up with 14 interpreters in the classroom, did you . Punipanic i sat in the classroom from a and tried to figure out what to do about it and ultimately realized that is what i needed to do. Most of the interpreters were former refugees or asylumseekers themselves have i learned so much from the professionals us will have that kind of background and the interpreters in the background they had decades to process the experience of coming here from difficult places or places of conflict. It sounds immersive, almost overwhelming. This is a contemporary bir b. Can you pull back the curtain a little bit on the process of the research that went into your book because you succeeded in bringing to life these four pivotal actors. You obviously must have felt personal letters or notebooks. What went in to read constructing these slides and the book . People were alive and she could interview them. I chose the subject where everybody had died and my colleagues said what do you do when you have a question you cant ask what they thought had tthe best you can. As a writer i told people in both classes every story has holes in them and you do your best to fill them up in the thee challenge is to turn a weakness into a strength so the absence of something can also be part of the story why didn didnt the n let us know what he or she was thinking, why arent their letters. Another thin thing we are missie of our panelists stuck on a plane in dallas but also did a story about the 21st century and i felt like the outlier and 92 to you a little bit about the 19th century and how different it is in the 19th century the Supreme Court is one example. The cases were decided 90 and they are from the same class or property and wealth. They regard Property Rights as being paramount. So when you want to win the case and find ways to appeal to that group of people because those are the people you are trying to persuade that has something to o understand as well as the fact of the amendment. The Supreme Court had decided it had an extensive view o of the t and had a narrow view that was frequently ruling again the civil rights cases. Having the Police Powers that the term of art and law to keep it in the law and order that they could separate the white and colored passengers that was the word in the law as a part of the Police Powers. People who were mostly men, lots of women in the story but the wives are very important they thought they were going to be somebody. You preserve your papers so somebody ca could write about yu after you die. There are letters and documents and in one case, 12,000 documents of one mans archives. I didnt read 12,000 documents. Fortunately they guide you a little bit, but that is a little bit of the pulling back the curtain. You have an idea for the book and an opportunity to write a book. Can you give us a sense of whats next if you write a proposal or find a publisher, how do you take this idea from your mind and turn it into a finished product . What are some of the steps that go into that . It was very fortunate i was working with an editor at scribner who i had worked with on my two previous books and so i didnt have a contract with him but i was speaking to him maybe once a month about the fact that i had been invited into this classroom and how it was going in at the beginning, my phone calls went Something Like there is no way i could possibly write a book about this classroom, nobody is saying anything. I cant get to know the students died on stories where they are from. Therethere is no dialogue, no character development, theres just a nice teacher going around saying basic things like how are you, what is your name, where are you from, and very basic questions and i thought this would be a terrible book. And my longtime editor said this is really unusual for you to be in this room and im fascinated by the mystery. Why dont you just stay there for a while. It wasnt until february or march that i actually ended up writing a proposal and at that point there were a couple of students in the room i felt fascinated with right away. There were a pair of students that showed up from iraq and one was wearing a headscarf covering his hair and the other was not. So i just was wondering what a muslim, are they not, why would one sister wear a headscarf and one would not. The whole back story was completely fascinating to me after hiring an interpreter and visiting them at home with a choicchance to hear their storyr father was christian, their mother was muslim, they identify with both religion, one feels more strongly than the other, they both have christian name, but in the United States they identify more as muslims because they were in turn produces being muslim all the time by the rest of us. And we dont concede a mixed faith families coming from the middle east because we have a very simplistic idea. Anyway, when i started getting to know the students at that level, i also got some brothers in the classroom from the democratic republic of congo similarly tha then i felt able o write a proposal, but it was almost six, seven, eight months into my time in the classroom, probably six or seven before i felt even i couldnt begin to say what i might read the book about. My confidence booster was my agent, most people who do what we do have eight tell you that is a terrible idea. Laughter is that you can get past the agent with a chance into the agents job is to find a proposal to put you in front of. When has that relationship with an editor and i had written the first book that i was cheating in publishers for various reas reason. She was the one who kept pushing me on the proposal. When you are trying to write a proposal, bu what does that word mean . New york editors who are acquiring books are getting a lot of proposals and you are advised to give them a reason to say no. That is why she did the proposal and knowing something about what your story is as critical to the process. When i teach writing, i often ask what seems to be a trick question which is what is the most important paragraph in your book, the first paragraph with the last paragraph . I would say there are two different answers depending on if you are a reader or a writer and i would say most would say the first paragraph and most would say the last. Not because the words in the last paragraph ar is so importat that the last is where the story is going into debt up and if you dont know how to get there, if you dont know the story you are telling, then you have no idea how to write the book and so for me i saw the shape of the book after seven months, seven months of research in the classroom and i did this research in archives before i could write a proposal because i want to be able to show the editors in new york beginning of the middle and at the end of the story even if i didnt know all of the places i was going to fill with information. And then he will not be riding with a few people buy yourself youll be with 30 or 40 people that is a huge change where device it . Three out of eight passenger railroads in massachusetts decided you will sit in separate cars that is a division how to best handle the question of race. And it surprises a lot of people that would be a recipe for disaster and then regret lagging and Railroad Construction so yesterday how much of a connection between san antonio as a city in the world as a city with a case comes from. New orleans is a french and spanish city new orleans had a Different Union the union forces took over new orleans to say we cannot win this war without controlling new Orleans San Antonio surrendered to the confederacy. So there is a link of understanding, mustve been in the 19th century from the deep south. New orleans is a fascinating city its the only place it couldve come from because when the american take over happened in 18 oh three he has a big problem and discovers there are 6000 free people of color. Not only free under the spanish and french but they have guns. They have a militia a militia takes a month to get a reply and says hey jefferson and madison what do i do with these free people of color and madison says i dont know you are on your own. They muddle through but it creates a desire for equal rights and not desire is frustrated again and again throughout the 19th century culminating with the committee that says we wont take it anymore. We will fight this law that requires a separation of passengers. You describe really well the civil rights era. This movement we think of the 2h century version but you describe the 19th century movement. The 20th century version dealing in the fifties and sixties but people dont know there were civil rights acts three of them in the Civil Rights Movement as well it was not as well organized but in that parallel narrative of the white men who argue the case and the resistors to separation who throughout the 1h century are fighting against the attempt to discriminate. This is after slavery. And then as a sign of classroom and how they acquire language. Especially someone studying Foreign Language that the english language has 250,000 words but the average speaker only uses 10000. That is so interesting. What more did you learn how we acquire language especially the teenage brain. Many of them arrived speaking languages already. That english is not one of the languages especially if they have multiple languages very good at learning other languages because the brains are younger and more plastic nobody my age biologically of that silent language acquisition and thats what you see with the baby when they learned their home language. So a persons brain is listening really hard then trying to make sense of foreign sounds. And only when you can a sound mind assign meaning then you try to articulate the new words yourself. And it was amazing to behold because not only starting off and those that spend their entire lives with refugee camps and have never lived outside of the camp setting and then they found themselves in denver navigating with urban high school and donald trump. But by the end of the year breaking into intermediate level acquisition and fluency to convey in english it would be a regular language because they said funny things one of the iraqi sisters there was the Asylum Seeker she kept calling the hair pasta because she did know the word for car also that would be fun as a quotation but they were being teenagers. So you see them start to flirt and stay over at each others houses and proposing one of the iraqi sisters to draw a blue ring on her finger and just being teenagers. One. I was in telluride it was called one book one canyon. Is a pretty white school in one of the students set i just loved reading the book because i realized they were nothing like us at all. But they are exactly like is at the same time. So that a teenager is a teenager and thats the point i was trying to convey. And earlier today on twitter that President Trump made a comment about asylumseekers talking about animals. So what is happening from the official standpoint and has it been a lifeline for them and i just came from cincinnati a few days ago bad womans club called the Woman City Club they were spectacularly good and one that anybody could speak english even before they talk to the coach they become a star runner over and over again. And those that have conflict and difficulty and with that level of exercise was determined and then the transition arriving in the United States. And with