Thank you to IRE for putting on a stellar lineup of immigration and immigration-related panels at its 2017 national conference in Phoenix. I was honored to have a chance to speak along with Aubrey Aden-Buie of Reveal and Mirwais Jalalzai, an Afghan journalist now living in the U.S.

The Book of Isaias is hitting the skies and the road for the spring 2017 book tour! I’ll be traveling from Pensacola to Seattle to Tucson and also doing several appearances right in Memphis and in nearby Oxford, Mississippi. For a full list of dates, click here.

And if you’d like me to come speak to your group, please send me an email at danieljamesconnolly@gmail.com. I hope to see you on the road.

Photos from The Book of Isaias went on display this winter in Princeton University’s sociology department. Professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly hosted me for a talk in October, and also enthusiastically agreed to display a series of photos taken by my colleague, Karen Pulfer Focht. I want to thank Karen for all her hard work on the photo exhibit as well as Professor Fernandez-Kelly and the sociology department administrator Kristen D. Matlofsky for their positive reception for this exhibit.

It’s an honor to know that our project is making an impact at one of America’s most prestigious universities. After this month, December, we’ll be making plans for the next photo exhibit. Stay tuned.

I’m proud to publish my first contribution to Global Nation, a project from Public Radio International.

Drawing on reporting I did for The Book of Isaias, I make the case that the federal government often doesn’t treat “illegal immigration” as though it were really illegal – rather, the government often allows unauthorized immigrants to remain in the United States openly, but with limited rights.

I wrote: Decades of hands-off federal policy have allowed millions of unauthorized immigrants to put down roots. If Trump follows through with his campaign promise of large-scale deportations in the US interior, it would mean casting out families that have lived here for years and disrupting the lives of their citizen children. It would represent a big shock to the economic and social order — perhaps a much bigger shock than many people imagine.

The story has generated quite a bit of readership and discussion since it was posted online. You can read it here.

 

 

I’m gearing up for my second week of book launch month, and I’m excited to announce that the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance has chosen The Book of Isaias as an Okra Pick, one of the top books of the season.
SIBA is a major trade group representing bookstores from Miami to Maryland, and they plan to highlight the book to their customers.
This is a huge honor. Among the other books on this season’s Okra Pick list are works by famous authors Nicholas Sparks and Pat Conroy. You can see the whole list here.