Mary Fontana ~ Author

Mary Fontana is the author of Strangers in the Province of Joy: Practicing Radical Hospitality on the US-Mexico Border, a narrative history of the migrant house of hospitality where she has volunteered for the past two decades, forthcoming in 2026 from Orbis Books. Her essays have been published in America and BorderLore, and her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, Rust + Moth, SWWIM, MER, Moss, and elsewhere. She trained as a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and did infectious disease research for a decade before turning to writing full-time. A reader and critic for the lit mag Only Poems, Mary now lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.