Refugee Memoir

Offering a nuanced and transformative take on immigration, multiculturalism, and America's role on the global stage, The Newcomers follows and reflects on the lives of 22 immigrant teenagers throughout the course of their 2015-2016 school year at Denver's South High School. Unfamiliar with American culture or the English language, the students range from the ages of 14 to 19 and come from nations struggling with drought, famine, or war.

As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the front lines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother's native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY - a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind.

Before the Soviet invasion of 1980, Enjeela Ahmadi remembers her home - Kabul, Afghanistan - as peaceful, prosperous, and filled with people from all walks of life. But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.

Born in the Old City of Sana’a, Yemen, to a pair of middle-class doctors, Mohammed Al Samawi was a devout Muslim raised to think of Christians and Jews as his enemy. But when Mohammed was 23, he secretly received a copy of the Bible, and what he read cast doubt on everything he’d previously believed. After connecting with Jews and Christians on social media, and at various international interfaith conferences, Mohammed became an activist, making it his mission to promote dialogue and cooperation in Yemen. Then came the death threats....

Somewhere in the Unknown World is a themed collection of stories of refugees from around the world who have converged on Minneapolis, collected and told by the award-winning author of The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet.

I Did Not Miss the Boat is the coming of age story of an adolescent girl who struggled to help her family & assimilation into a new country while searching for her own identity. From surviving the vast South China Seas, pirate raids, and uninhabited Indonesian islands to surviving high school and family life, Lea Tran did not experience a typical American upbringing.

Daughter of Song is a gripping account of a bold attempt to right an irreparable wrong while spanning dangerous treks through the Khmer Rouge-controlled jungles of Cambodia and the suffering of wasted years behind bars.

At age eleven, Kenan Trebinčević was a happy, karate-loving kid living with his family in the quiet Eastern European town of Brčko. Then, in the spring of 1992, war broke out and his friends, neighbors and teammates all turned on him. Pero—Kenan’s beloved karate coach—showed up at his door with an AK-47, screaming: “You have one hour to leave or be killed!” Kenan’s only crime: he was Muslim.

Memories of an Italian Holocaust refugee as told to his son.

1948, Jerusalem. Zakia is forced to flee the only home she’s ever known as war rips through the leafy streets and the bustling spice-filled souqs. Taking just one suitcase, Zakia thinks she’ll be able to return soon. But within weeks, she realizes she won’t be allowed back to her beloved homeland.

This Very Short Introduction covers a broad range of issues around the causes and impact of the contemporary refugee crisis for both receiving states and societies, for global order, and for refugees and other forced migrants themselves. Gil Loescher discusses the identity of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons and how they differ from other forced migrants. He also investigates the long history of the refugee phenomenon and how refugees became a central concern of the international community during the 20th and 21st centuries.

lhan Omar was only eight years old when war broke out in Somalia. The youngest of seven children, her mother had died while Ilhan was still a little girl. She was being raised by her father and grandfather when armed gunmen attacked their compound and the family decided to flee Mogadishu. They ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where Ilhan says she came to understand the deep meaning of hunger and death. Four years later, after a painstaking vetting process, her family achieved refugee status and arrived in Arlington, Virginia.

The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles - a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story.

A lifetime of plans and dreams are packed into a container and shipped from Los Angeles to a Caribbean island; but for a writer and immigrant from post-WWII Europe, the past is hard to forget and even harder to leave behind. Passage From England is the emotional journey of a man's search for home that interweaves the adventures and tragedies of his childhood in America's 50s and 60s with the experiences of early retirement in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The journey begins in 1956, crossing the Atlantic by ocean liner, arriving in New York Harbor, then traveling by train to the paper-thin ...

At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her father, sister, grandmother, and uncles fled Saigon for America. Beth’s mother stayed—or was left—behind, and they did not meet again until Beth was 19. Over the course of her adult life, she and her mother have spent less than 24 hours together. Owner of a Lonely Heart is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth’s relationship with her mother.

Shares Rosemary’s early experimentation with psychedelics in the 1950s, her development through the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, and her involvement, at first exciting but then heartbreaking, with Dr. Timothy Leary. Describes her LSD trips with Leary, their time at the famous Millbrook estate, their experiences as fugitives abroad, including their captivity by the Black Panthers in Algeria, and Rosemary’s years on the run after she and Timothy separated.

To keep the people she loves safe, Sara left everything she knew behind. She soon learns this new world is nothing like her old one, and she struggles to make a place for herself among the Mohiri. But it soon becomes apparent to Sara and to everyone one around her that she is not your typical warrior. As the weeks pass, Sara builds new relationships, copes with her new trainers, and tries to manage her ever-changing powers while keeping her unique heritage a secret.

Carlos Eire's story of a boyhood uprooted by the Cuban Revolution quickly lures us in, as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother Tony touch down in the sun-dappled Miami of 1962 - a place of daunting abundance where his old Cuban self must die to make way for a new, American self waiting to be born. In this enchanting new work, narrated in Eire's inimitable and lyrical voice, young Carlos adjusts to life in his new country.

Three years ago, award-winning actress Angelina Jolie took on a radically different role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Here are her memoirs from her journeys to Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Ecuador, where she lived and worked and gave her heart to those who suffer the world's most shattering violence and victimization. Here are her revelations of joy and warmth amid utter destitution...compelling snapshots of courageous and inspiring people for whom survival is their daily work.