Photo by Lisa Woods.
Jessica Goudeau’s first nonfiction book, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and a Christopher Award. It was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book,World Magazine’s “Understanding the World” Book of the Year, a Library Journal “Best Social Science Book of the Year” and one of Chicago Public Library’s “Best Books of 2020”; it was a finalist for the Writer’s League of Texas Nonfiction Book Award, a finalist for the BookTube Prize, shortlisted for the Chautauqua Prize, and longlisted for the Reading the West Narrative Nonfiction Award. Her second nonfiction book, We Were Illegal, was named one of “19 Nonfiction Books to Read This Summer” and an Editor’s Choice book by the New York Times and an NPR “Book of the Day,” and received a starred review from Kirkus.
She has been a columnist for Catapult and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Teen Vogue, among many other places. She produced projects for Teen Vogue (“Ask a Syrian Girl”) and “A Line Birds Cannot See,” a documentary about a young girl who crossed the border into the US on her own that was distributed by The New Yorker. Goudeau spent more than a decade working with refugees in Austin, Texas and was the co-founder of Hill Tribers, a nonprofit that provided supplemental income for Burmese refugee artisans for seven years until it successfully ended when the last artisan found full-time employment. She is the co-host and producer, with Christine Renee Miller, of “The Beautiful and Banned,” a weekly conversational podcast about banned books, plays, and films now and throughout history. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Texas, served as a Mellon Writing Fellow and Interim Writing Center Director at Southwestern University, was a Visiting Professor at Sewanee School of Letters, and teaches Creative Nonfiction at Wilkes University.
A portion of the royalties from book sales will be shared with “Mu Naw” and “Hasna.” We’re so grateful to the readers who helped raise more than $5,000 for a travel fund in August 2021 to help them reunite with their families. That fundraiser is now closed, but follow Jessica on social media for frequent posts about how to help displaced people in humanitarian crises.