Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was born in Besançon, France on February 26, 1802. Originally on track to become a lawyer, he instead became France’s revered Romantic poet, novelist, and dramatist. He is the author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, among countless others. For fifteen years, Hugo lived on the island of Guernsey in political exile following the 1851 coup d’état by Napoleon III. There he wrote The Toilers of the Sea, published in 1866. When Hugo died in 1885, he was given a national funeral and burial in Paris’ Pantheon. Andrew Chater is a broadcaster, storyteller and cultural explorer. The winner of six BAFTA awards for his history programming in the UK, he now lectures in History and Literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he leads students on a series of classes exploring regional cultures through the medium of classic and contemporary fiction — a format he calls “bookpacking” (www.bookpackers.com). Maya Weeks is a geographer, writer, and artist from rural California working on feminist environmental justice. A first-generation college student, she holds her B.A. in Language Studies (Spanish) from the University of California in Santa Cruz and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California in Davis. Recent poetry has been published in Space on Space and recent nonfiction has been published in Zócalo Public Square. A record, Tethers, is out on Full Spectrum Records. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, How to Be on the Outside of Every Inside/How to Be Inside Every Outside (these signals press, 2016). Residencies include Konstepidemin, The Arctic Circle, Mustarinda, Norton Island, and more. Maya lives and works on unceded Chumash land.
