Free Book Talk: Strangers in a Strange Homeland (SF)

CJ Hopkins & Hugo Fernandez will be in SF on Friday, October 3rd and there will be an open-to-all event at Adobe Books in the Mission, followed by a dinner for members of Sane Francisco Community.

PRESS RELEASE
STRANGERS IN A STRANGE HOMELAND
On the Road in 21st Century America

(working title)

Press Statement
C. J. Hopkins

During September-October 2025, photographer Hugo Fernandez and I will travel throughout the USA by car, talking to people from all walks of life and of all political persuasions and taking photos of the country along the way. Our adventures on the road, the stories and perspectives of the people we meet, and Hugo’s photographs will be published as a book by Arcade Publishing in 2026.

Our goal is to paint a portrait of America, in all its complexity, at this historical (and historic) moment.

Many other authors and photographers have done such “Portrait of America” road-trip projects, Robert Frank, John Steinbeck, and James Agee and Walker Evans, to name just a few. So that’s not new. What is unique, however, is the perspective I bring to it. I’m an American, and I traveled all over the USA in my youth, but I have lived in Europe for twenty years. So, in a sense, I am coming home to a country I have never been to before. I want to discover and explore that country as it is today, or as much of it as I can, as “a stranger in a strange homeland.”

Hugo Fernandez, a professor at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY, will also be seeing the country with somewhat estranged eyes. Having mostly worked with large-format photography for the last forty years, he’ll be returning to the handheld B&W style of his early work for this project.

And, in a broader sense, aren’t we Americans all “strangers in a strange homeland,” no matter how far back our roots in the country go, or how long we may have been away from home? Except for the Native Americans, we’re all from somewhere else.

In these times of extreme political polarization, cultural fragmentation, confusion, anger, and fear, what is it, if anything, that still unites us as Americans? How did we get here? Where are we? Where are we headed? These are some of the questions I’m hoping to explore with the people we meet along the road.