Mary Fontana is the author of Strangers in the Province of Joy: Practicing Radical Hospitality in the Borderlands, forthcoming in 2026 from Orbis Books. This narrative history of the migrant house of hospitality where Mary has volunteered for two decades draws on personal experience and extensive interviews to tell the story of migration across the US-Mexico border over the past fifty years. Mary is also an essayist and award-winning poet whose prose and poems have appeared in The Sun, America, BorderLore, Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The Seattle Review, Moss, SWWIM Everyday, and elsewhere. She is a reader and critic for the literary journal Only Poems.
Mary has lived on every edge of the United States: she was born in south Louisiana, made her first childhood memories in Maryland, attended school in Washington State, and came of age on the border between Mexico and west Texas. After studying biology and creative writing in college at Gonzaga University, she spent over a year living and working at Annunciation House, a house of hospitality for migrants and refugees in El Paso, Texas. She then earned a Ph.D. in Immunology & Pathogenesis from the University of California, Berkeley, and did infectious disease research for a decade, all the while volunteering part-time with Annunciation House. In 2022 she quit her laboratory job to write her first book. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two children, who have recreated her in LEGOs. She loves to read, drink tea, and yes, ride her blue bike.
Mary Fontana ~ Author 