Lauren Markham

Biography

Lauren Markham is an award-winning writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, and the New York Times Magazine. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Crown, 2017), A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Riverhead, 2024), and Immemorial (Transit, 2025). She is a contributing editor at VQR. 

Lauren Markham
Jeremiah Barber

See Work

REPORTING / Winter 2024

The Sedini Special

By Lauren Markham ,  Illustrations by Celina Pereira

If you could move anywhere, where would it be? This used to be a question I’d ask myself or others at dinner parties or in fits of fancy, but two years ago, as new parents facing both the unsustainable costs of Bay Area life and the looming...

Markham 1
REPORTING / Spring 2020

No End in Sight

By Lauren Markham ,  Illustrations by Jen Renninger

What happens when immigrant-rights advocates reach a breaking point?

Illustration by Jen Renninger
PHOTOGRAPHY / Fall 2017

Law & Order

Photography by Jan Banning ,  Essay by Lauren Markham

What Justice Around the World Has in Common

Centre Pénitentiaire de Lille-Annoeullin. France, 2013. Photograph by Jan Banning.
PROFILES / Fall 2016

Prince of Peace

By Lauren Markham ,  Photography by Juan Carlos

San Salvador’s upstart mayor, Nayib Bukele, has promised a new way forward for a city besieged by decades of violence. His biggest obstacle, however, may not be the city’s gangs, but the city’s idea of itself.

San Salvador Mayor Nayib Bukele by Juan Carlos
#VQRTRUESTORY / Winter 2016

Northbound

By Lauren Markham

The second installment of #VQRTrueStory—our new social-media experiment in which stories and images cross platforms, from Instagram to the website to the magazine—features Lauren Markham reporting on migrants in Central America.
ESSAYS / Spring 2015

The Meringue War

By Lauren Markham

How chefs claim their creative turf on Instagram.
ESSAYS

An American Humanitarian Crisis?

By Lauren Markham

The surge in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the US border is so alarming that President Barack Obama described it as “an urgent humanitarian situation.” Following the president’s comments, the federal government announced a $2...

REPORTING / Summer 2013

First the Fence, Then the System

By Lauren Markham ,  Photography by Scott Dalton

In early June, President Obama declared the wave of unaccompanied minors crossing illegally into the US—a number expected to reach 90,000 this year—an “urgent humanitarian situation.” While FEMA now coordinates their basic care, the federal...

The border fence, Rio Grande Valley, Texas.
REPORTING

Immigrant Kids in Limbo

By Lauren Markham

Children crossing the border alone are one of the fastest-growing and most vulnerable demographics of undocumented immigrants in the United States. In recent years, the number of unaccompanied minors transferred from DHS to the Office of...