A panel discussion with Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chris Feliciano Arnold, Kisha Lewellyn Schegel, Inara Verzemnieks and Jessica Wilbanks

A former believer goes back to church. An adoptee returns to the country of his birth to chronicle its evolution from military dictatorship to fledgling democracy. A woman from the borderlands of Texas goes north to better understand what happens when an international borderline divides a people in two. A descendant of refugees retraces their path of flight back to the family’s ancestral village. In this panel, four writers whose work moves between memoir, history, and narrative nonfiction talk about the deeply personal origins of their most recent books, the interplay between their own history and their reporting process, and the way their narrative personas shifted and evolved through the course of their projects.