American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience

Posted by Penguin Random House on September 26, 2023

American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience by Diya Abdo has been selected by the North Carolina Humanities for its statewide book club program, NC 2024 Reads! The selected five books “explore issues of racial, social, and gender equity.”

American Refuge tells the stories of several refugees who now call America home. It’s a book about the spectrum of the refugee experience — life in beloved homes, the conflict that necessitates flight across a border, years spent in a refugee camp, and then the journey to and resettlement in the U.S. Grounded in the personal stories of new Americans (including my own and my family’s) from Palestine, Burundi, Iraq, Syria, Burma, and Uganda, American Refuge is a humanizing narrative of one of the most pressing global crises of our time — forced displacement — that has landed, touched, and found its way to the waiting and ready people of a mid-size American city.

American Refuge has found its way into many college and university classrooms as well as book clubs and reading groups. It’s been a pleasure visiting with those readers in person and through Zoom. The author hopes you will consider American Refuge for your own readers, whether they be students, teachers, staff, or community members. Diya would love so much to visit with your group, talk about the book and about the refugee experience, and answer your pressing questions or discuss the issues that matter to you. Contact Diya Abdo at abdod@guilford.edu.

Diya Abdo was the 2023 PHENND Conference, Refugee Resettlement & Immigration, keynote speaker on March 24, 2023 at Swarthmore College.