An ambitious memoir in essays by beloved bestselling author Reyna Grande that illuminates the hidden cost of the American Dream and the complex journey of healing that follows survival.
Reyna Grande has spent her career powerfully capturing the raw reality of life across borders. Her memoirs laid bare the trauma of family separation and celebrated her journey to become a college graduate and a writer. Now, in Migrant Heart, she offers her most probing and intimate work yet, turning her gaze inward to expose the scars left by migration and the ongoing work of stitching herself back together.
Grande unflinchingly interrogates how living between two nations, two languages, and two identities has shaped the woman, mother, and writer she has become. In this collection, she confronts the deepest questions of the immigrant experience: How do we bridge the two worlds we live in? What does it cost you to lose your language? How do we turn pain into power? And when traumatic memories threaten to define us, how can telling our story help us heal while honoring our boundaries?
Migrant Heart is a powerful testament to Grande’s role as a storyteller and cultural witness. It is an essential, moving read that continues to expand what we understand about the United States and the complex people who cross and live within its borders. It is a book for anyone seeking to understand the true price of belonging and the enduring power of finding one’s voice.
Reyna Grande is an award-winning author, motivational speaker, and writing teacher. As a young girl, she crossed the US–Mexico border to join her family in Los Angeles, a harrowing journey chronicled in The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her other books include the novels A Ballad of Love and Glory, Across a Hundred Mountains, and Dancing with Butterflies, the memoirs Migrant Heart, The Distance Between Us: Young Readers Edition, and A Dream Called Home, and the anthology Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings. She lives in Woodland, California, with her husband and two children. Visit ReynaGrande.com for more information.
Grande will be in conversation with Marie Arana, a prizewinning author of eight books, nonfiction and fiction. Winner of an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, she has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a guest columnist on Latin America for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Marie is most recently the author of “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” chosen by the New Yorker as one of the 12 Must Read Books of the Year. Among her other books are the National Book Award Finalist “American Chica,” the novels “Cellophane” and “Lima Nights,” the biography “Bolívar: American Liberator” (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and a sweeping history of Latin America “Silver, Sword, and Stone,” which the American Library Association named the best nonfiction book of 2019. She currently serves on the boards of PEN America, PEN/Faulkner, the Authors Guild, the American Writers Museum, the Amazon Conservation Association, and the Library of Congress’s Madison Council; and she has also served on the advisory council of the United States Southern Command. She is president of the 152-year-old Literary Society of Washington. In 2024, at an awards ceremony at the Organization of American States (OAS), she received the Distinguished Leadership for the Americas Award.