At six years old, Antonia Rivera crossed the border from Mexico with nothing but the doll in her hands. Ajla Dizdarević’s family brought traditions across an ocean after leaving a home torn apart by the Bosnian War. Sarah Elgatian’s grandmother played cards and spoke of a country her Armenian-American grandchild had never known. Hieu Pham couldn’t relate to all of her mother’s Vietnamese traditions, but when she became a mother herself, everything changed. Rana Hewezi grappled with tragedy in her Egyptian family’s past and the power of a name in determining her fate. Anthony Mielke couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to his birth story than he had been told.A member of the Meskwaki Nation, Dawson Davenport was born into a world that was not told in the history books.

How do we make our way in a society that looks nothing like the one our families once knew? How do we find a sense of belonging in a past and a place we’ve never been, or in a world that feels as if it’s changing faster than we are?
These seven stories take us on a ride through the heart and the moral conscience as they explore how we find identity and make a future in an America that is still deciding on its own.

Join the Iowa Writers’ House at Prairie Lights on June 29th at 11am for the first event in our state-wide launch for We The Interwoven Volume 2, stories of living between two worlds written by Iowa immigrants and bicultural residents from across the state of Iowa. In this event, our 2019 writers will be sharing their work with the community for the first time.