4th Place "Afghan Americana" by Leila C. Nadir

Afghan Americana is an intimate-geopolitical memoir that chronicles Leila Nadir’s coming-of-age as a mixed-race girl in an immigrant family haunted by colonial violences and unspoken traumas. The book excavates the messy networks of military, industrial, emotional, spiritual, racial, colonial, and ancestral legacies that dump so much debris on our burgeoning identities, imprinting secrets and denial in our bodies.

“When I was ten years old, my boobs started growing, and the new mosque opened on Westfall Road.”

Bio: Leila Nadir is an Afghan-American writer and artist obsessed with possibilities for collective memory and repair after the ecological disruptions, geopolitical violences, immigration and exile, and colonial traumas. She is Founding Director of the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Rochester and holds a PhD in literature from Columbia University. @afghanvegan