The Displaced: Refugee Writers On Refugee Lives

Edited by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and Vietnamese American professor, this heartbreaking collection of essays humanizes the refugee experience. Accomplished writers tackle the differences between refugees and immigrants and how Donald Trump's election and Brexit influenced the perception of refugees in the United States and Europe. Most moving are tales of parents and children who left their homes for better lives yet lost so much of themselves. Contributors describe harrowing escapes, economically driven evacuations, and wartime disasters that forced them out of many countries: Mexico, Bosnia, Thailand, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Chile, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Hungary, Iran, Zimbabwe, China, and more. Dina Nayeri's "The Ungrateful Refugee," about childhood bullying, and Meron Hadero's "To Walk in Their Shoes," a chronicle of his parents' path from Ethiopia to Germany to Czechoslovakia to Washington, DC, will especially resonate with teens.