Diya Abdo, Lincoln Financial Professor of English and founder of Every Campus a Refuge (ECAR), will be among featured authors at the annual Greensboro Bound book festival Saturday, April 11.

At 2:30 pm that day at Greensboro History Museum, Diya will join Bryan Christopher, a high school educator and author, and Noor Ghazi, a peace activist and writer, for a conversation entitled “Contemporary Immigrant Stories in America.”

This year’s festival has the theme of “American Kaleidoscope.” Authors and conversations reflecting the strength of America’s diversity are being spotlighted as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday. Imani Perry, Beth Macy, Warren Zanes, Silas House and Casey McQuiston are among the authors appearing at this year’s festival. See the full schedule here.

Diya is a second-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Jordan. She began teaching at Guilford in 2008, and her scholarship explores Arab women writers and Arab and Islamic feminisms.

In 2015, she founded ECAR, a national initiative that has helped campuses across the country host and support more than 600 refugees in building new lives. She authored American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience in 2022.

Through her writing, teaching, and advocacy, Diya expands understanding of belonging, displacement, and what it means to shape the American story.

Bryan is an English and journalism teacher at Riverside High School in Durham, N.C., and the author of Stopping the Deportation Machine: One Immigrant Student’s Arrest and the Kids Who Took on Washington to Get Him Back.

Noor is an Iraqi-American focused on conflict, culture and rebuilding through education. She interviewed students and education experts for Education Interrupted, a webinar series about how conflicts across the globe have impacted on students’ access to education.

The Greensboro Bound book festival was first held in 2018 and has been an annual spring event each year except in 2020, when it was cancelled due to COVID.