When Sahar Mustafah, a Palestinian-American author and teacher, heard about the 2015 murder of three Muslim students in North Carolina by their white neighbor, she turned to writing to process the attack and its ramifications.

"It was the kind of event that just rattled me to my core," says Mustafah, who is based in Chicago. "What compels someone that you know, a neighbor, to bring a gun to your door and shoot you in cold blood?"

That Mustafah's 2020 debut novel, “The Beauty of Your Face,” was timely is beyond doubt: it arrived in the final year of a Trump administration that had opened the floodgates of white nationalist violence and further inscribed Islamophobia into federal law. Yet in shopping the book to publishers, Mustafah says, it was precisely the sections involving the shooter's attack on a Muslim girls' school run by the main character, Afaf, that led most publishing houses she approached to pass on the novel.

In this episode, editor Natasha Roth-Rowland interviews Mustafah about the responsibility of representing her community to a mainstream audience, the grief of immigration, and writing as a critical tool of emancipation.

The music in this episode is by Ketsa.

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