Michel Stone: I grew up on Johns Island and saw migrant workers throughout my childhood.

How did you come to be a writer of the illegal immigrant experience, a cultural perspective wholly different than your own? Let’s start with a question I suspect you get from time to time. Jonathan Haupt: Michel, welcome to the Porch. We were fortune to be able to invite her back to the Porch for an original interview in advance of her January 26 appearance in Charleston as part of the Blue Bicycle Books Luncheon Series. Michel Stone previously appeared on Porch Talk in an interview reposted from Shelf Awareness. Told with a deeply felt compassionate and journalistic attention to detail, Stone’s novels are inherently humanizing rather than politicizing, making them all the more relevant to ongoing debates about immigration and the fate of the storied American Dream. Stone offered a heartrending continuation of Héctor and Lilia’s story in her second novel, Border Child, published in 2017. In it, Stone introduced readers to Héctor and Lilia Santos, young parents gambling on their dream of a better life by undertaking a harrowing undocumented immigration from southern Mexico to the South Carolina coast with their infant daughter. Lowcountry native Michel Stone was on the receiving end of such high praise for her 2012 novel The Iguana Tree. It’s a good sign when book reviewers favorably compare your debut novel to the work of John Steinbeck. I look for the connectedness among human beings.” “My fiction illuminates the everyday conditions of characters who, at first glance, may live lives very different than my readers, but with whom, ultimately, my readers will empathize.

Sky Wings by Don Conroy