Around the World and Into the Past: Stories

Jo Ivester attended Reed, MIT, and Stanford in preparation for a career in transportation and manufacturing. Following the birth of her fourth child, she became a teacher. She and her husband teach each January at MIT. She is the author of The Outskirts of Hope: A Memoir of the 1960s Deep South (She Writes Press). In 1967, when Jo Ivester was ten years old, her father transplanted his young family from a suburb of Boston to a small town in the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields, where he became the medical director of a clinic that served the poor population for miles around. But, it was Ivester’s mother who made the most enduring mark on the town. In The Outskirts of Hope, Ivester uses journals left by her mother, as well as writings of her own, to paint a vivid, moving, and inspiring portrait of her family’s experiences living and working in an all-black town during the height of the civil rights movement. Norman Lear says, “The Outskirts of Hope is a yesteryear tale (1967) that could not be more pertinent and helpful to the racially complex and perturbed time we are living in now.”

Magda Montiel Davis is the founder of the law firm, Montiel Davis & Fonte, which specializes in immigration law. She was selected as one of The Best Immigration Lawyers in America. Davis’s essay “Ashes Over Havana,” included in The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World, is the story of a former Cuban exile who tries to spread her father's ashes on the homeland.