Sarah Towle is an international educator, researcher, and award-winning author; a human rights defender, nature lover, and choral soprano. She resides in an ephemeral borderlands, buffeted and buoyed by a diversity of languages, cultures, landscapes, and creeds. She has taught English language literacy, cross-cultural communication, conflict resolution skills, and the writing craft for three decades on four continents across the age span and in myriad contexts, including under the trees in refugee settings. Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, a Nonfiction Authors Association Gold Medal recipient, launched in June 2024 to rave reviews from filmmaker Ken Burns, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Toluse Olorunnipa, former Boston Globe Spotlight editor Scott Allen, and Kirkus Reviews, which called it “A powerful exposé of the human costs of America’s immigration policies.” Sarah publishes regularly on Substack@Tales of Humanity. Her op-eds have appeared in the Boston Globe, Common Dreams, and Al Jazeera. Find her podcast, From the Borderlands, wherever you listen. To learn more about both book and author, please visit www.sarahtowle.com.
about CROSSING THE LINE: FINDING AMERICA IN THE BORDERLANDS
It was family separation and “kids in cages” that first drove Sarah Towle to the US southern border. On discovering the many-headed hydra that is the US immigration system, she refused to look away. Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands charts her journey from outrage to activism to abolition as she exposes, layer by broken layer, the now global deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation complex that is set up to fail everyone—save the profiteers and demagogues who benefit from it.
Sarah deftly weaves oral storytelling, history, and memoir together to illustrate how US policy has led the charge in flouting post-WWII global commitments to protecting human rights. Yet within the web of criminalization and cruelty, Sarah finds hope in the extraordinary acts of ordinary heroes who prove, every day, that there is a better way. By amplifying their voices and celebrating their efforts, Sarah reveals that we can welcome with dignity those most in need of safety and compassion. In unmasking the real root causes of the “crisis” in human migration, she urges us to act before we travel much further down our current course—one which history will not soon forgive, or forget.