Jennifer Leone spent a decade teaching in public schools before making the leap into higher education and committing herself to her writing.

Her newest YA novel, Borderless, follows a teen girl and her mother as they set off

on a perilous journey from Guatemala City to the U.S. Mexico border.

Jen and I talk about the delicacy of writing an immigrant experience that is not your own,

and the very surprising action, not hard work, not writing groups, not butt in the chair, that

truly allowed Jen to step into her future as a writer.

Jen, thanks so much for doing this.

It's my pleasure.

All of your bios say you grew up in the Boston area, and I'm just going to need more detail than that.

Where did you grow up near Boston?

So I was born in Jamaica Plain.

I knew it. I knew it was J-B.

Yep, yep. That's my whole family lived there. And when I was two, we moved to a suburb of Boston.

You're born in the United States. Your parents come from Guatemala. What were the stories growing up that they told you about Guatemala? They told us so many stories,

you know, in English and Spanish, at the kitchen table, in the car. And the stories were always

ones of pride about being from Guatemala and also struggle. They were not shy about letting

us know that they moved to the United States for

economic reasons, primarily, and that they were here in order to give us the opportunities that

they could not have. So that was really saturated in every story that they told.

You graduate from Connecticut College with a double major,

International Relations, and French. You earn a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of

San Francisco's Center for Teaching Excellence in Social Justice while you were doing TFA. What was it

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