Flying off to Arizona tomorrow for the Tucson Festival of Books is a big deal for me. But one of the first panel sessions to catch my eye includes world-traveling novelists tackling the topic Contentious Politics and Social Change. People-and-planet working together is our best hope for a thriving future, so I’m excited to learn from the widest variety of perspectives I can. David Wright Faladè studied at my small alma mater, and we share the same graduating class year, though I started a year earlier than he did and took a detour to Univ of MT. He started college, as I did, from small town origins, out of West TX, and he began his global explorations with an off-campus study program to France. I took the leap across the big pond to Germany, studying the rise and fall of Nazism. Later Wright Faladè was a Fulbright scholar in Brazil, and through his teaching at the University of Illinois has led students in Benin and other “slave coast” nations of west Africa, where he learned he has relatives in Dahomey. If you’ve seen the recent movie The Woman King with Viola Davis, this city will ring a bell. Wright Faladè’s latest novel is The New Internationals, and I’m excited to read it.

Also on the panel is the international Marjan Kamali, who grew up in Turkey, Iran, Germany, Kenya and the U.S., where she works at Brandeis University. Shelf Awareness says this about her latest novel: “Gorgeous, gripping…insightful, compassionate, and grounded in historical detail, The Lion Women of Tehran is an evocation of a country upended and a tribute to the ways deep friendships shape our lives.” Although one word we hear repeatedly in our national news scene these days is “unprecedented”, the upheavals Kamali has witnessed or studied will offer wisdom we can use.

With The Stone Home, third panelist Crystal Hana Kim illuminates lessons from South Korea in the ‘80’s. A close colleague who lives near me grew up in Hawaii with a father from South Korea who spent critical years in Japan before marrying her Swedish-American mother, so I look forward to sharing this story with her and hearing how it might relate to stories heard during her travels among South Korean family. For many bibliophiles, books have provided the magic carpets we rode to places and experiences that broadened us beyond the small towns or insulated communities we were raised within. Reading helps familiarize us with experiments, connections and layers of deception and courage people have used in other places and times to push through challenges and forge something more livable on the other side. The planet is counting on us to drop our limiting beliefs and leap into this ocean of knowledge and story.