STRANGERS IN A STRANGE HOMELAND
On the Road in 21st Century America
CJ Hopkins is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and political satirist. His plays have been produced and toured all over the world and are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing. His political satire and commentary is published on Substack, and on his blog, Consent Factory, Inc., and in book form by Skyhorse Publishing and Consent Factory Publishing. His first novel, Zone 23, is published by Arcade Publishing. He has a second novel in the works.
Hopkins and photographer Hugo Fernandez are traveling 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. Their adventures on the road, the stories and perspectives of the people they meet, and Hugo’s photographs will be published as a book by Arcade Publishing in 2026.
Their 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 Hopkins brings to it. He’s an American, and he traveled all over the USA in his youth, but he has lived in Europe for twenty years. So, in a sense, he is coming home to a country he has never been to before. He wants to discover and explore that country as it is today, or as much of it as he 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.