Wendy Call will read from No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy. Wendy Call visited the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—the lush sliver of land connecting the Yucatan Peninsula to the rest of Mexico—for the first time in 1997. There she found herself in the middle of a ferocious battle over plans to industrialize the region, where most people still fish, farm, and work in the forests. In the decade that followed her first visit, Call witnessed farmland being paved for new highways, oil spilling into rivers, and forests burning down. Through it all, local people fought to protect their lands and their livelihood—and their very lives. With timely and invaluable insights into the development battle, Call shows that the people who have suffered most from economic globalization have some of the clearest ideas about how we can all survive it. Wendy Call is  the co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. She is also associated with the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park of Vermont and the Studios of Key West. She writes and edits nonfiction and translates Mexican poetry and short fiction. Before turning to full-time word-working in 2000, she devoted a decade to work for social change organizations in Boston and Seattle.

Midge Raymond will read from the new and expanded edition of her prize-winning story collection Forgetting English. These stories explores the indelible imprint of home upon the self and the ways in which new frontiers both defy and confirm who we are. Including new stories, Forgetting English takes us around the world, from the stark, icy moonscape of Antarctica to the lonely islands of the South Pacific, introducing us to characters who have abandoned their native landscapes only to find that, once separated from the ordinary, they must confront new interpretations of who they are, and who they are meant to be. Midge Call's  stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Redivider, the Bellingham Review, the American Literary Review, the Indiana Review, the North American Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times magazine, and many other publications.