2nd Place Creative Nonfiction: "Amreeka" by Ahmed Kabil

Deep in the heart of post-9/11 Texas, sixteen-year-old Ahmed learns about the America imagined by the 1960s counterculture — and sets off to find it. Blending memoir and history, Amreeka is a tragicomic coming-of-age story of an Arab American’s long, strange trip to discover where he’s really from. 

"But the question of where I was from was never one of math, just as it was never one of geography. And I rarely answered it to my satisfaction or to the satisfaction of the people asking. For there was always a second question lying in wait behind the first, to be asked anytime I answered incorrectly, anytime I tried to lay claim to a sense of belonging to a place that, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I had not earned: No, but like: where are you really from?"

Bio: Ahmed Kabil (he/him) is an Egyptian American writer based in Barcelona. He is currently studying for an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Visit him at www.med.earth