Peter Orner, a creative writing professor and fiction writer at SF State, read from his new novel, “Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives,” accompanied by the book’s other contributors at the Poetry Center on campus Sept. 11.

The book focuses on exposing the stories of undocumented workers and individuals in the United States, trying to live and earn money for their families back home while living in harsh conditions and circumstances. “We went into this thinking we knew the issue, when in fact, we didn’t know half of it,” said Orner.

Orner and co-editors, David Hill, Mimi Lok, along with current undergraduate creative writing student Alberto Reyes Morgan, read excerpts from the book that they had compiled and explained their experiences with the individuals to a group of students and visitors.

Each editor showed a passion for their story. “We spent a lot of time with these people to gain their trust; you start talking to them and they are scared because they can very easily be deported, detained or abused,” Orner said.

The book took over a year and a half to compile including at team of lawyers, translators, graduate students and friends to interview 60 individuals and capture a total of 24 stories that would represent the 15 to 20 million undocumented workers in America.

“We see a lot of people in America going against immigration, the idea of immigration, but they never sit down and talk to these people,” Orner said. “That was our goal in writing this book, to find out who was effected by these immigration policies and put a face to them.”

The book required nationwide travelling and well as communication with community organizations in order to get in touch with each individual. Orner traveled to Oregon and Ohio, while Lok traveled to New York. They also had other stories in Kansas, Virginia, California and many other states.

Morgan spoke to a woman named Elizabeth who was originally from Bolivia and came to America to make money to help her daughter’s medical condition. She has since been deported.

“I never actually met her but I still keep in touch with her over the phone, we got very close and she wanted me to tell her story,” Morgan said. Elizabeth was the only person whose real name was used in the book.

“People come to this country with some sort of mythology, thinking that they will find work anywhere,” David Hill, a contributing editor, said. “But obviously, that’s not the case.”

Orner said that immigration is not being discussed nationally right now and that it is, in a lot of cases, ignored because it is too controversial.

“Releasing this book in itself was a political statement,” Orner said. “But we did not set out to be political, all we wanted was to sit down with these people and really listen because that just doesn’t happen.”

The book is a part of McSweeney’s “Vision of Witness” series, which currently has three books of oral histories and is in the process of a fourth. “We showed these people that we cared and that’s what brought the stories out and compiled these oral histories,” Orner said.