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Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Â鶹¹ú²úAV magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town by Susan Hartman K’74

Tags Alumni Book Kirkland College Alumna

(Boston: Beacon Press, 2022).
Meet Sadia, a bright, spirited Somali Bantu teenager who rebels against her formidable mother; Ali, an Iraqi translator who creates a home with a divorced American woman but is still traumatized by war; and Mersiha, a hard-working Bosnian who dreams of opening a café.

All three are newcomers to the United States, and Hartman follows them for eight years as they and their families adjust to life in Utica, N.Y., a city revived by the influx of refugees from Vietnam, Bosnia, Burma, Somalia, Iraq, and elsewhere. These immigrants have transformed the struggling area over the past four decades — opening small businesses and fixing up abandoned houses. “Other Rust Belt cities have also welcomed refugees, hoping to jump-start their economies and attract a younger population,” the publisher notes. “City of Refugees is a complex and poignant story of a small city but also of America — a country whose promise of safe harbor and opportunity is knotty and incomplete, but undeniably alive.”

The author is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Newsday. She notes about the book project: “My editor at Beacon Press turned out to be a recent Â鶹¹ú²úAV graduate, Haley Lynch [’17]. And she is brilliant! The book actually opens with [Professor of Economics] Erol Balkan, who guided me into this project; my time at Kirkland is also part of the intro. So, it’s a bit of a family affair.”



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Stacey Himmelberger

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