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 May 2026 from Orbis Books. Her writing has been published or will soon appear in America, BorderLore, Consequence, The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, SWIMM, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2025 Richard J. Margolis Award for social journalism and has been nominated for Best of the Net. 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.