Margaret Regan is the author of two prizewinning books on immigration.

The most recent, “Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire” (2015), which won a starred review in Publishers Weekly, looks at the fate of undocumented immigrants who are arrested long after they’ve established lives and families in the United States. “The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands (2010) investigates the tragedy of migrant deaths in the desert. Both were named Top Picks in the Southwest Books of the Year competition.

A longtime journalist in Tucson, Margaret started writing about the border in 2000. She has a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania and she also studied French at the Sorbonne in Paris. She has twice gone to Guatemala, and studied Spanish in two tiny schools in the colonial city of Antigua.

After working as a French editor for TV Guide magazine and as a children’s book editor at McGraw-Hill in New York, Margaret turned to journalism. She started as a reporter at the Express-Times in Easton, PA; she’s been writing for the Tucson Weekly since 1990. She has won many journalism awards for her arts criticism, her border reporting, and her stories on the Irish immigrant experience. She also reports regularly on the arts for The Buckmaster Show, KVOI Am 1030, Tucson.

Her work has been published in the Guardian, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, Utne Reader.  Sojourners, Newsday, Black + White, Photovision and in many regional and local publications. She has appeared on NPR, C-Span Book TV, WHYY Philadelphia, KPFK Los Angeles, Pacifica and many other radio stations, and she gave a TEDx talk in Phoenix. Most recently, in March 2016, Margaret did a solo half-hour Q&A appearance on Book TV’s “Open Phones,” program, taking questions about immigration from viewers around the nation. She’s a regular speaker at the Tucson Festival of Books.

Her books have been adopted in many university classrooms, including the University of California Davis, Loyola University Chicago, Franklin Marshall College, James Madison University, Butler University, Northern Arizona University, Arizona State University and the University of Arizona.

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