Bledsoe grew up in Portland, Oregon, and now lives with her partner Patricia Mullan in Berkeley Hills, California. A novelist and nonfiction writer, she has been awarded two National Science Foundation fellowships for writers, and her books have been translated into five languages. Exploration and discovery on a personal and global scale mark her work.

[Dear America] ends—around the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration—with Vargas confessing to feeling “lost and alone.” He wonders if it’s time to return to the Philippines. Despite this gloomy conclusion, Dear America is a story that highlights one man’s courage, honesty, and humanity in the face of an appallingly callous immigration system.

ADRIENNE RICH (1929–2012) was a 20th-century poet who wrote essays and criticism with the same ease and effectiveness that she brought to her major craft.

In Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, we see the artist as vulnerable and self-questioning. For two periods in his life, 1981–’82, and 1988–’89, he ad-libbed into a tape recorder touching on topics such as life in the city versus living close to nature, the distractions that interfere with artistic output, sensitivities about art as self-revelation, the dangers of art-world acclaim, loneliness and isolation, [and] sex as …