Wed 12/2 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Mary Fontana presents her new book. Strangers in the Province of Joy is the story of America writ small—a nation founded by immigrants and its shifting, oft-contradictory attitudes toward them.

Since 1978, El Paso’s Annunciation House has welcomed over half a million people: migrants and refugees, doing what humans have always done to find sustenance and safety, and volunteers seeking meaning and purpose. Through this chronicle of their individual journeys, Mary Fontana exposes the forces driving global migration and challenges readers to confront the borders in their own hearts.

“An incredibly uplifting story of how one community’s relentless hospitality and grace reveal the way to repair the deep damage we have done to the people of the Americas, to the border and to our spirit. These are the kind of heroes we need in America today. A must-read.” —Beto O’Rourke, former congressman and author, We’ve Got to Try

“Recounts a reservoir of community, ingenuity and commitment. . . . JUST WHAT WE NEED in this moment.” —Simone Campbell, SSS, author, A Nun on the Bus

An important, necessary, and heartbreaking book.—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, author of Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

"Annunciation House is well-known to anyone working in immigration for the care and attention they give to migrants. In the same way, this book attends to the story of Annunciation House and the people who made it the beacon of hope it is today." —Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration

“Annunciation House is a rare beacon of hope in an increasingly dysfunctional immigration system. Mary Fontana provides the first detailed history of Annunciation House, documenting how volunteers motivated by faith provided “radical hospitality” to hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing poverty and persecution."—Robert Moore, El Paso journalist

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, published in May 2026 by Orbis Books. Her writing has appeared in America, BorderLore, Sojourners, National Catholic Reporter, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, SWIMM, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2025 Richard J. Margolis Award for social justice journalism, and her manuscript Bright Extinction was a finalist for the 2026 Catamaran Poetry Prize. 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. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.