Synopsis

Before becoming the bestselling author we know today, Barbara Kingsolver was a fresh college graduate who had just moved to Tucson, Arizona with hopes of open space and adventure.

What she found was quite different, "another America" that she chronicled through her poetry, in which she came to share her home with refugees and committed to paper their tragic stories of life at and beyond the borderland.

Interweaving past political events from the US-backed dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, to the government surveillance carried out in the Reagan years, Kingsolver's early poetry expands into a broader examination of the racism, discrimination, and troubled immigration system she lived beside.

They coalesce in a record of her emerging adulthood, in which she confronts the realization that the national myth of America she'd signed on to was a hypocrisy -- a realization…