A Personal Journey
Five Books to Read That Are Written by Refugees
Each person who experiences life as a refugee or immigrant has a story to tell.
Apart from the more journalistic and detached lens of news coverage, history books, or academic works, personal narratives and fiction books can a great avenue for seeing the intensely personal side of the immigration and asylum experience. Ultimately, there is no better representation for these communities than their own voices.
The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You
Dina Nayeri (368 pages)
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Well-published and prize-winning author Dina Nayeri has often written about her experience as a refugee, her family having fled Iran during her childhood. Her family eventually landed in Oklahoma, where came of age before making her way to Princeton University and starting her writing career. In this book, she invites readers to examine the way the western world talks about refugee experience, weaving artfully her story with other vibrant and singular accounts from refugees and asylum seekers from around the world.
Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas
Roberto Lovato (352 pages)
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Written as a child of immigrants from El Salvador, author Roberto Lovato explores in his memoir his family’s traumatic story, the influence of gangs and guerilla warfare, and U.S. foreign policy in Central America, and his own coming-of-age experience in California. The book is described by the New York Times as “a meditation on the vicissitudes of history, community and, most of all… identity.” Lovato is a strong advocate of Lantinx representation in literature and has a body of published reporting work that explores several topical issues and struggles in Latin America.
While the Earth Sleeps We Travel: Stories, Poetry, and Art from Young Refugees Around the World
by Ahmed M. Badr, with forward by Ben Stiller (178 pages)
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This colorful and artistically illustrated collection looks at the lens of the refugee experience through the eyes of children. Starting in 2018, Ahmed M. Badr, an Iraqi-American poet and former refugee, traveled to multiple countries to host storytelling workshops with displaced youth; this book is a compilation of their poems, personal narratives, and art. There is a foreword written by Ben Stiller, an actor and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. The book pulls together diverse perspectives and meditates upon the concept of “home,” and how we construct the narratives of our lives.
Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience
A collection of poems by various artists
edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond (208 pages)
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This book could be perfect for the younger poetry lover who reads at 12–17 year old reading level; it is a collection of 64 pieces by diverse writers in their young adulthood, hailing from all over the world. Through their writing, they address their experiences as first and second generation immigrants and refugees. The poems explore experiences common to newcomers to any country: cultural and language barriers, feelings of homesickness or being excluded, and the seeking of what it means to honor one’s roots and carve out a new path.
The Refugees
by Viet Thanh Nguyen (201 pages)
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Author Viet Thanh Nguyen is known for his written work on the Asian diaspora, and in this acclaimed fiction novel, he laces together several short stories of refugees who make the bridge between living in Vietnam and the United States. The book was written by the author over the period of 20 years. He includes tales of wildly different characters who are each motivated by experiences and relationships; yet they are all drawn to move to attain self-fulfillment in their “adopted homeland.”
