Immigration Essays

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. When Baker received a MakeWork grant to write about Chattanooga's unheard voices, she had no idea that her project would take her from the homes of Chattanooga's refugees in "Landings" to what "Critical Flame" calls a "Sebaldian travelogue through the Syrian migration route" in "Reverse Migration." From her childhood home near Ferguson, Missouri, to her travels as an expatriate living in Asia, to the troubled cities of Eastern Europe, Baker explores the physical and emotional wanderings of what Mary McCarthy calls "exiles, expatriates, and internal emigres."

"Adventures of a Fake Immigrant" and "Schemers" examines her ambivalent complicity in Chattanooga's rapid gentrification and the erasure of its historically black neighborhoods.

Using photos, literature, and her own family's slave-owning history, Baker excavates her own past as well as Chattanooga's to try and understand the ghosts that haunt her and the city she inhabits. With a poignancy that is particularly relevant for these times, the voices in this collection echo through the text and shine brightly through the dark.

Sybil Baker's forthcoming Immigration Essays (C&R Press, 2017) and is already being hailed as "an amazing and essential odyssey for our times." Named one of "today's strongest emerging talents in literary fiction and poetry" by Anis Shivani from the Huffington Post, Sybil is also the author of three books of fiction, Into This World, Talismans, and The Life Plan.
 
She is a 2012 and 2014 MakeWork grantee and received a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist's Fellowship for 2017.Her work has appeared in many publications including Guernica, Electric Literature, Glimmer Train, The Critical Flame, The Writer's Chronicle, The Collagist, and The Nervous Breakdown.

Sybil received her MFA in creative writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She spent twelve years teaching in South Korea before returning to the States in 2007. During her extensive travels throughout Asia, she became increasingly interested in the allure and alienation of American travelers and expatriates, and this has heavily influenced her writing. A UC Foundation Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Sybil lives in Chattanooga with her husband.  In 2015 she was a Visiting Professor at Middle Eastern Technical University in North Cyprus. She is on faculty at the Yale Writers' Conference and taught in the low residency MFA program at City University of Hong Kong. She is Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat.