MENA History Month: Non-Fiction

A young Somalian, who learned English through American pop culture uses his skills to post secret dispatches to the Internet and NPR after a radical Islamist group comes to power and until he finally wins a visa lottery to emigrate.

The author presents her memoir in which she struggles growing up between American and Arab cultures.

A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life. Because, as she learned, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins.

Maz Jabroni recounts his childhood growing up Iranian in America and his quest to make it in Hollywood without having to wear a turban...his memoir chronicles a lifetime of both killing it and bombingonstage, but with no actual acts of terror.

Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.

Graphic novel of the author's life as a Filipino-Egyptian-American with a large, unique, loving family striving for the American Dream.

An intimate graphic memoir about an American girl growing up with her Egyptian father's new family, forging unexpected bonds and navigating adolescence in an unfamiliar country.

A graphic memoir by young Syrian Muhammad Najem, who rose to international notoriety during the Syrian Civil War due to his on-the-ground reporting using social media.

Refugee advocate Luma Mufleh writes of her tumultuous journey to reconcile her identity as a gay Muslim woman and a proud Arab-turned-American refugee.

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.

In San Jose, California, in the 1990s, teenaged Sara keeps a diary of life as an Iranian American and her discovery that she and her family entered as undocumented immigrants.

An autobiography of the Olympic fencer, Ibthihaj Muhammad,and how she became the first American woman to compete in the Olympics wearing a hijab.