The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees: Tales of Migration, Hope, Grief, and Finding Home in Nebraska

Human beings have always migrated. To be on the move, searching for a more hospitable climate, greater resources, and a welcoming community, is part of our human DNA. All kinds of large, uncontrollable forces―war, the threat of genocide, climatic changes, political exile, and economic hardship―propel people to leave behind everything familiar and begin their lives over again in a strange place, sometimes with only the clothes on their backs.

The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees offers thirty-one essays by immigrants and refugees who now call Lincoln, Nebraska, home. These individuals have found support, belonging, and opportunity through the collaborative work of Lincoln's New Americans Task Force members and the Lincoln/Lancaster County Welcoming and Belonging Strategic Plan. The stories in this book are brilliant, harrowing, poetic, and revelatory. They're also stories of survival, resilience, creativity, and a staggering amount of work: learning a new language, navigating a challenging immigration system, being perceived as a foreigner, struggling to grasp strange new customs and traditions, working one's way out of extreme poverty, working through trauma and grief. Those of us who have had the good fortune of not being displaced have much to learn by listening.

Leirion Gaylor Baird is the mayor of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Matthew F. Bokovoy is a senior acquisitions editor at the University of Nebraska Press, specializing in Native American and Indigenous studies, general nonfiction of the American West, and borderlands history. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Planning Association, New Mexico Historical Review, and Reviews in American History. He is the author of The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880–1940.

Lisa Guill is communications director at the Asian Community and Cultural Center. She is also the Welcoming Communities coordinator at Cultural Centers of Lincoln.

Michelle Carr Hassler is professor emerita of journalism at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She was a newspaper reporter for sixteen years in Colorado, Arizona, and Nebraska. Hassler has received nine national teaching awards, most from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication-refereed competitions and her students have won national and regional awards, including the 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Digital Reporting. Hassler has received grants from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and Knight Foundation. She was executive director of the Nebraska High School Press Association and received the R. Neale Copple Friend of Journalism Award in 2019.

Joy Castro is Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies and director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the author of the memoir The Truth Book (Nebraska, 2012), the essay collection Island of Bones (Nebraska, 2012), the fiction collection How Winter Began (Nebraska, 2015), and the literary thrillers Hell or High Water, Nearer Home, Flight Risk, and One Brilliant Flame. She edited Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family (Nebraska, 2013), and serves as the founding editor of Machete, a series in innovative creative nonfiction by underrepresented voices at Ohio State University Press.

Emira Ibrahimpašić is associate professor of practice in School of Global Integrative Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research articles have appeared in Translocal: Contemporary Local and Urban Cultures Journal, Island Studies Journal, and CAPA: The Global Education Network Academic Publications.