Jeanne Carstensen and Michael Scott Moore discuss Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis and their work as investigative journalists.

Join award-winning journalist Jeanne Carstensen for a conversation with journalist and author Michael Scott Moore to celebrate the paperback release of A Greek Tragedy.

The book reconstructs a single, devastating day during the 2015 refugee crisis, when an overcrowded boat capsized off the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos, claiming hundreds of lives. Drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, Carstensen brings together the voices of survivors, rescuers, and witnesses to illuminate both the human cost of forced migration and the extraordinary acts of courage that followed.

In conversation with Moore—author of The Desert and the Sea, a memoir of his own harrowing experience of captivity by pirates and survival at sea—the two writers will explore what it means to document trauma at sea, the ethics of bearing witness, and how storytelling shapes our understanding of crisis.

Timely and deeply moving, this event offers a powerful look at survival, responsibility, and our shared humanity in an era of global displacement.

Tickets are available for $10 or with the purchase of A Greek Tragedy, now out in paperback. Purchase tickets on Eventbrite or on the Village Well website.

About the participants:

Jeanne Carstensen is an award-winning journalist and author of A Greek Tragedy (Simon & Schuster), a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Galbraith Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the California Book Award. Her work appears in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among others. She has received support from the Pulitzer Center and fellowships from Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and Mesa Refuge. She lives in San Francisco.

Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and novelist, author of the comic novel Too Much of Nothing and the nonfiction book Sweetness and Blood, named one of The Economist’s best books of 2010. He writes about immigration for Bloomberg Businessweek and previously worked as an editor at Spiegel Online. Kidnapped by Somali pirates in 2012 and held for 32 months, he later recounted the experience in his international bestselling memoir The Desert and the Sea.

About the book:

The gripping true story of a devastating shipwreck during the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

On October 28, 2015, a boat meant for only a few dozen passengers, capsized off the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. Hundreds of refugees, forced in desperation onto the overloaded boat manned by armed smugglers, were tossed into a roiling sea. The resulting loss of life, the largest in a single day during the crisis in the Aegean, shocked the world.

Now, after nearly a decade of research, interviews, and investigation, reporter Jeanne Carstensen has captured the dramatic twenty-four hours—including details of the refugees’ lives before they left their homes to the courageous rescue efforts of the Greek islanders and volunteers rushing to help, even as their government and the EU failed to act. Carstensen brilliantly showcases the extraordinary heroism of ordinary people in extreme circumstances.

In a world where forced migration is on the rise, A Greek Tragedy challenges us to confront our collective humanity. It’s an unforgettable testament of our times and a compassionate depiction of the lengths to which a person will go to save another human being.