Please join the Portland Public Library and the MWPA as we host a virtual Literary Lunch conversation between Stephanie Cotsirilos and Sue Roche .
Cotsirilos’ debut novella, My Xanthi. is a deeply personal story echoing global displacements— whether at the Mexican border, refugee camps, or in too-often ignored colonial American history. My Xanthi centers on a Greek immigrant woman whose wartime secrets teach a criminal defense lawyer about love’s triumph over injustice.
Carol Smith, a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist and author of Crossing the River: Seven Stories that Saved My Life writes, “A coming-of-age story, a reckoning, and a taut psychological thriller, Stephanie Cotsirilos’ My Xanthi offers two unforgettable characters — Nick, a death-penalty defense lawyer and family man facing a crisis of conscience, and his beloved, long-dead Greek immigrant nanny, Xanthi, whose letters and grim secret…guide us into the darkest territory of the human heart, a place where the borders between good and evil, right and wrong blur…My Xanthi is a fearless look at law and justice and the difference between them.”
To order the second edition of My Xanthi, please go HERE
For the Zoom link to this event, please head over to the event page at the Portland Public Library by clicking on the button below.
Stephanie Cotsirilos is the author of the novella My Xanthi (Los Galesburg Press), an essayist in the forthcoming anthology Breaking Bread (Beacon Press), and was a published finalist in Mississippi Review’s Prize in Fiction. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The New Guard, New Millennium Writings, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and in various media. In 2021, she was awarded the Katahdin (formerly Patrice Krant) fellowship in residence at Storyknife’s inaugural retreat for women writers in Alaska.
Sue Roche has been with ILAP (the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project) since 2000. She started as ILAP’s first Staff Attorney before becoming Legal Director, and was named the organization’s Executive Director in 2013. Prior to earning her JD from Northeastern University, she worked in publishing and spent a year teaching English in Costa Rica. Sue is an expert on issues related to family-based immigration and remedies for noncitizen domestic violence and crime survivors, and has been a presenter at regional and national conferences of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. She is the author of “Maneuvering Immigration Pitfalls in Family Court: What Family Law Attorneys Should Know in Cases with Noncitizen Parties,” which is published in The Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.