I find myself pulled towards stories of displacement and wandering, spiritual and political, and the ways we work together to resist hopelessness and isolation in the face of human suffering. I started out writing about travelling with my young family to sacred American spaces (Chimayó in New Mexico, the Holy City of the Wichitas in southwestern Oklahoma, the Little Log Houses of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine, the town in Kansas where my first daughter was born). That led to an obsession with medieval pilgrimage, which led to The Book of Wanderings (Little, Brown, 2015) in which that first daughter and I retraced a medieval pilgrimage route from southern Germany through the Mediterranean to Jerusalem, and then through the Sinai Desert to Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt the summer after the Arab Spring.
Encounters during a return journey to the Middle East in 2015 awakened me to the realization that Houston, my home city and an epicenter of refugee resettlement, was at that time beginning to resettle Syrian refugees. I started writing about that for Texas Monthly, which later brought me to write about Congolese refugee farmers in Houston, as well, for Orion Magazine. This work culminated in Accidental Sisters: Refugee Women Struggling Together for a New American Dream (University of California Press, 2024), written in deep collaboration with the six women—from Iraq, Syria, Congo and Sudan—whose stories appear in it.
I am a 2019 MacDowell Fellow and have received grants from Houston Arts Alliance and writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. My longform article, “Waste Land, Promised Land,” originally published in Orion Magazine, recently won the 2018 Excellence in Journalism Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. The Book of Wanderings was the winner of the 2016 Memoir Book Award from ASJA and a finalist for the 2015 PEN Southwest Nonfiction Book Award. My longform article, “Holy City of the Wichitas,” originally published in Ecotone, is anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2012.
In addition to my work as a writer, I helped found and currently help manage Shamba Ya Amani, the Farm of Peace, alongside a collective of refugee and immigrant women and other local Houstonians.
Thank you for your interest in my work!
Photos by Meridith Kohut