Join us for a conversation between the author of The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, Wendy Pearlman, and Co-Founder of Chicago in Arabic, Malek Abdulsamad, about the displacement of millions of Syrians and their meaning of home. We will have a short reading from Wendy before the conversation as well as a chance for audience Q&A.

The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora takes Syria’s refugee outflow as its point of departure. War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home? With gripping immediacy, Syrians now on five continents share stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement. Recasting “refugee crises” as acts of diaspora-making, The Home I Worked to Make challenges readers to grapple with the hard-won wisdom of those who survive war and to see, with fresh eyes, what home means in their own lives.

Wendy Pearlman is professor of political science at Northwestern University. She speaks Arabic and is the author of five books on the Middle East, including We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

Malek Abdulsamad was born and raised in Damascus, Syria and immigrated to New York after graduating from Damascus University Architecture school. In 2012, Malek moved to Chicago to earn his Masters’ Degree in Urban Planning and Public Policy at UIC and he has been working in Commercial Real Estate since graduating in 2013. With his Co-Founder, Anwar Jebran, they founded Arabic Media Company in 2016 with a mission to bring Chicago news into focus in Arabic. Since then, they expanded to cover New York, LA, Montreal and other major cities.