Diya Abdo has settled into life in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s thousands of miles from Jordan, where she, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, was raised. A professor at Guilford College, Diya is working hard to reshape the refugee experience in America. She is challenging university campuses everywhere to step up and host families fleeing war and violence around the world. It stems from her own experience, as well as her belief in radical hospitality and radical accountability. Every Campus a Refuge, the program she founded, is changing hearts and minds.
Bio—
Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. She is a second-generation Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jordan. Her teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers, Arab and Islamic feminisms, and refugee studies. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her book, American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience, was selected as a North Carolina Reads 2024 Book. In 2015, Diya founded Every Campus a Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. The flagship chapter at Guilford College, has hosted nearly 90 refugees thus far. Diya is the recipient of several awards including the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize. Diya contributed her story, “Food and Other Weapons,” to Eno Publishers’ anthology The Carolina Table. She also contributed an essay to 27 Views of Greensboro. She lives in Greensboro with her partner, two daughters, and four cats.She lives in Greensboro with her partner, two daughters, and four cats.
