Pre-Order for All Water Has Perfect Memory! Available Now!

Are you ready to dive in to 4 generations of my family's (hidden) history? Fun fact: It took a global pandemic for me to finally get up the courage to heal generations of trauma through therapy & my creative writing practice. That & A LOT of public crying😬 it was absolutely worth it! Now im …

Eid Mubarak Cover Reveal! All Water Has Perfect Memory: A Memoir

The time has finally come to showoff my debut book's beautiful cover! Shout out to The Chicago Review of Books for featuring it ( the article is just the best!)... and of course huge shout out to my bestie Jewel for creating this masterpiece! My book will be available in September 2023 but pre-order link …

Gains and Losses

As an ESL teacher, I think a lot about the stages of language acquisition, my immigrant and refugee students and their families, and what we often lose along the way. I remember my mother remarking how relieved she felt when she was able to pull some strings at the education office and placed me in …

Exhale 2020

My childhood had a clear delineation between before and after: pre-trauma and post ( or continued smaller) traumas. I cant help it but sometimes it takes me by surprise tinged with wonder that my children's lives have not mirrored my experiences and that to me is evolution... These past four years with Trump triggered so …

Headlines Be Clunky: Finding Words Amidst Chaos

This time last year, we took our first family trip out west. My husband, a community organizer, got the opportunity to attend a conference in Olympia, Washington, a place he called home for four years as a college student at the Evergreen State College. I had never been out west before and my eagerness to …

The Kids Are Alright: Unplanned Summers & What That Has To Do With Racism

These days I feel triggered by these targeted ads and headlines showing up in my social media feeds about surviving the summer with the kids, and the difficulty of parenting this summer during the pandemic.   First of all, when is it not hard to constantly be the one doing all the childcare? It takes …

Black Lives Matter: The Parenting Edition

These are heavy times. As a mother, teacher and writer, it can all feel like too much if I let it... My son, half Palestinian, half Black is 11 years old this year. We have so many folks checking in on us during this historic time of global pandemics, police violence and protests. While people's …

Once upon a Time…

"Media are major industries, generating profits and employment, they provide us with most of our information about the political process, and they offer us ideas, images and representations (both factual and fiction) that inevitably shape our view of reality." (David Buckingham, Media Education) I immigrated to the United States in the fall of 1990.  Iraq …

Kids These Days

Kids These Days (2015) Light as a feather, stiff as a board Anything could happen child, anything could be. My child today: my brown boy one day brown man-child Days after news of school shootings. Weeks after and before another Black person slain Talked about emergencies, running to his aunt's house that is close to …

My Kindergarten Freak Out…part II

I started drafting this post last winter… when I sill pregnant with Meena and overwhelmed with teaching full-time and juggling family life… as a result it sat in my drafts folder, but our recent decision to apply to an independent/private school sent me back here to finally complete this post! Dec. 2014 Things with my …