Book excerpt: The IPPY Award–winning anthology of poetry, memoir, and essays—“accounts of assimilation and nostalgia, celebration and resistance” (Rick Barot, author of The Galleons). This collection contains contributions from sixty-five writers who were either born and/or raised in the United States by one or more immigrant parent. Their work describes the many contradictions, discoveries and life lessons one experiences when one is neither seen as fully American nor fully foreign. Contributors include Richard Blanco, Tina Chang, Joseph Lagaspi, Li-Young Lee, Timothy Liu, Naomi Shihab Nye, Oliver de la Paz, Ira Sukrungruang, Ocean Vuong, and many other talented writers from throughout the United States. Winner of a Bronze Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Multicultural Nonfiction “When you hold in your DNA two countries—the cultures, the languages, the delicious foods and stories—you embody richness. These writers know on the cellular level many-layered ways to live, to struggle, to love. Here are voices we need to hear, writers we need to read. This is a brilliant, timely book, an antidote to divisiveness.” —Peggy Shumaker, former Alaska State Writer Laureate “The poets and writers in Two-Countries show that one result of our ongoing national experiment is a rich deepening in our literature. We may be in perilous times as a country, but our writers have never been in more ferocious health.” —Rick Barot, author of The Galleons