Mitali Perkins: Hi, my name is Mitali Perkins and I am the author of "You Bring The Distant Near." This is the story of three generations of a family who moved to the United States from India. It's very much based on my own family, and three generations are called "strangers." The first generation, my parents, who come here mid-life and they don't know much about the culture. They have to learn from scratch what it means to be an American. The middle generation, was based on my life, are called "travelers" in the book. We are the ones that can switch back and forth from culture to culture. The third generation, the generation of my kids is in the book called "settlers," and they're the ones that are trying to figure out who is American, what does it mean to be American. Are they American? How Indian are they? That's the way the book journeys through one whole family.

I want to talk to you today about the title. I'm not good at picking titles.

So this book was originally called "Borderlines" and it's very much based on my own life and my own family, and the way we moved to the United States. I was having a difficult time with the title. My editor went on a long reading weekend of Rabindranath Tagore poems. He's mentioned in the book, he's a famous Bengali poet. He's written thousands of poems, and she came back with the suggestion of "You Bring the Distant Near." Now this was a complete surprise because when I got married, my husband was the first person who wasn't of Indian descent to marry into our family. My grandfather sent us a poem to be read in our wedding, and that poem was "You Bring the Distant Near." So this was quite a gift, and because the book is about our family, and how we really, we crossed many borders, and people who felt distant really came near to us.