Native journalist and world traveler Terria Smith (Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla) joins us with her memoir of adventure, love, and self-discovery.
About the Book
Growing up on the Torres Martinez Reservation in Southern California, Terria Smith longed for adventure. She became a journalist, hitting the road to report on the diverse and multifaceted lives of Native people around the United States. Then she set out to see the world beyond the borders drawn relatively recently and, oftentimes, without regard for the peoples or geography of those places. As her collection of passport stamps grew, so did her understanding of community, and what it means to be a world citizen today.
I Love You So Many—named after a favorite expression of her Spanish-speaking relatives—follows Smith from her ancestral homelands to Cuba, Iceland, Guyana, and back again. With exuberant, laugh-out-loud style she tells us her stories of forging profound friendships, falling in and out of love, and experiencing hard and heady times alike. Smith brings a fresh sensibility to travel writing, building enduring relationships with the people and cultures she visits.
For Smith, travel is deeply rooted in Native traditions: It’s about sharing, reciprocity, risk-taking, and the valuable (and sometimes awkward) work of bridging and holding differences. As fun as it is poignant, I Love You So Many is an irresistible tribute to getting out and living a life in full.
About the Speakers
Terria Smith is a tribal member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians and a proud original Californian. She is the editor of News from Native California magazine and director of the Berkeley Roundhouse, Heyday’s California Indian publishing program. Smith is also the editor of the 2023 anthology Know We Are Here: Voices of Native California Resistance. She received her undergraduate degree at Cal Poly Humboldt and earned her master’s degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She lives on her ancestral homelands in the Coachella Valley with her puppy, Havana.
Piper Kerman is the author of the memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. She serves on the board of directors of the Women’s Prison Association and the advisory boards of InsideOUT Writers, Healing Broken Circles, and JustLeadershipUSA. Ms. Kerman has been called as a witness by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights to testify on solitary confinement and women prisoners, and by the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs and Homeland Security Committee to testify about the federal Bureau of Prisons, and has spoken at the White House on re-entry and employment. In 2014 she was awarded the Justice Trailblazer Award from John Jay College’s Center on Media, Crime & Justice and the Constitutional Commentary Award from The Constitution Project; the Equal Justice Initiative recognized Ms. Kerman as a Champion of Justice in 2015. She teaches writing in two Ohio prisons as an Affiliate Instructor with Otterbein University.
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