The OSU Press book, “I Lived to Tell the World: Stories from Survivors of Holocaust, Genocide, and the Atrocities of War” by Elizabeth Mehren, was one of two books selected to represent Oregon at the 2025 National Book Festival in Washington, DC. The other was Leslie Barnard Booth’s “One Day This Tree Will Fall.”
Every year, the Library of Congress asks each state Center for the Book to select titles that represent the state’s literary landscape to highlight at the National Book Festival, an event showcasing the importance of books and reading. This year the National Book Festival will be held Sept. 6.
“I Lived to Tell the World,” is the 2025 Oregon Adult Readers’ Selection. The book features 13 profiles of men and women who have endured unthinkable cruelty, only to resume productive lives in their new homes in Oregon. They come from Rwanda, Myanmar, Bosnia, Syria and elsewhere — different stories, different conflicts, but similar paths through loss and violence to a new, not always easy, life in the United States.
Mehren is a Portland-based writer, editor and educator. After working at The Washington Post, she became a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and later spent a decade on the faculty at Boston University.
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