John Washington is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, a community-focused media outlet where he writes about the border, climate change, democracy, and more. He has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Intercept, and other outlets. His first book, The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond, was published in 2020 by Verso Books. Washington is also a translator of books by Anabel Hernandez, Sandra Rodriquez Nieto, and others. His most recent translations include The Hollywood Kid by Óscar Martínez and Juan Martínez, and Blood Barrios by Alberto Arce, which won a PEN Translates Award. Both were co-translated along with Daniela Ugaz. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, and tweets @jbwashing.
“A powerful and convincing case for human solidarity and cooperation for which Washington provides a roadmap. Unlike many commentaries and books about the fraught border, he does not leave out the Indigenous communities whose homelands have existed in the area for centuries before the border was violently imposed by the United States in 1848.” —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Not “A Nation of Immigrants:” Settler-Colonialism , White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
"John Washington makes a strong, eloquent and even inspiring case for the relaxation and ultimately the abolition of border controls." —JM Coetzee