Immigrant Strong: December 2025

Year-end wrap-up, and essays on watching war, being childless, and straddling identities

Hi there,

I hope you’re gentle on yourself this time of the year, which can be fun but can easily turn stressful. I sincerely hope everyone feels it’s okay to abandon societal expectations and not feel obligated to shop for everyone they know, spend hundreds on holiday cards, or pose with their family in matching pajamas. It’s a good time of the year to assess which traditions we want to carry versus what we do because it’s the status quo, or out of some sense of pressure. Whether you’re alone for the holidays or spending them with family or friends, I hope they bring you rest and joy, in whatever form and shape that comes for you.

Thank you for being a part of the Immigrant Strong community—this little free project will soon be seven years old, and is fueled by your likes and shares. I appreciate every action you’ve taken to support immigrant and refugee authors, whether it’s buying their books, recommending their work to a friend, or forwarding this newsletter. Every time you do that, it lets me know people are reading it, and helps reach new readers. If you want to connect, you can also find me on Instagram.

Hedgebrook, AWP, Electric Literature and LARB pieces, Must Love Memoir reading

For me, 2025 started on a high note at Hedgebrook, and it is no exaggeration to say this writing residency was like a dream. Other highlights include going to my first AWP conference, reading at the Must Love Memoir reading series in New York and publishing this Eurovision essay, which made Electric Literature’s list of the year’s most popular stories.

I published my first author Q&A for the Los Angeles Review of Books (though I’ve done many of these in my nonprofit life), won a grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts and a Croatian Woman of Influence Award. And, of course, I got rejected from publications, grants and a residency, didn’t come even close to my writing goals, and disappointed myself over and over. But I kept this newsletter alive for another year, kept most of my sanity while living under a fascist government, and did my best to remain positive in a world on fire.

I’ll be kicking off 2026 with a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and hope that’s a good start to another year of reading, writing, and community.

Thank you again for being a part of Immigrant Strong, and wishing you love, peace, and creativity in the New Year,

Vesna

---

Book

I loved Edgar Gomez’s debut memoir so it was not surprising I also enjoyed their memoir-in-essays, Alligator Tears, about growing up poor and queer in Florida. Gomez writes with vulnerability, honesty, and humor, and I appreciated how they placed their story within the context of this country’s harmful treatment of immigrants, those who are poor, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Edgar, who was born in Florida to a mother from Nicaragua and father from Puerto Rico, beautifully explores issues such as poverty, race, and sexuality, and exemplifies how fulfilling community-building can be in one’s life.

---

Essays and Interviews

For LitHub, Tareq Baconi wrote about How it Feels to Watch a Civil War Unfold From the Comfort of Your Living Room.

“Baba’s parents, who had stayed behind, had internalized an altogether different lesson from the Nakba: It is better to die in one’s home than in exile. It was a lesson that was incomplete. When his father did die of a stroke, in a besieged city that Baba could not get to, leaving his mother grief-stricken and alone under heavy bombardment, the full truth dawned on them: Neither exile nor home could ever offer shelter from heartbreak or the senseless violence of war.”

I enjoyed this interview with Daniel Tam-Claiborne for the The Rumpus about his debut novel, Transplants.

“I wrote this novel for anyone experiencing living in the interstices— the space between cultures, between places, and between identities—that has always been my passion as a writer. The feeling of being caught between worlds is one many know well. For those who straddle identities—whether as immigrants, children of immigrants, expats, refugees or cultural wanderers—there’s a quiet exhaustion in constantly translating yourself–in being asked, “Where are you really from?” Anyone who has ever felt like an outsider or struggled to fully belong will hopefully find a connection with this novel.”

Here is an essay on a topic that is finally getting more attention -- and who better to write it than Mona Eltahawy. For Guernica, here is Childfree by Choice.

“Those of us assigned female at birth are expected not only to put that womb into the service of patriarchy, but to more fundamentally offer ourselves up in service. To mother is to be in service—that most “feminine” of enterprises in the form of care and caregiving. To always put others first. To never say, “I come first.” To always sacrifice. To never insist that you are worthy, empty womb notwithstanding.”

Few topics are treated with as little nuance as the impact of U.S. foreign policy on other nations, so I was glad to see Leila Nadir giving some much-needed context and history in this piece. For Salon, she wrote about Afghanistan’s tragedy: From Reagan’s “nation of heroes” to Trump’s “hellhole on Earth.”

“What both Reagan and Trump’s stories have in common is the attempt to redefine Afghans and reduce them to caricatures. In these narratives, Afghans are either all good or all bad, pure heroes or absolute terrorists. And as wildly divergent as these claims seem, they share a single goal: They are designed to distract Americans from the reality of U.S. policies that have destabilized Afghanistan, exploited, displaced and killed Afghan people, and weaponized Islam.”

For The Offing, here is a Q&A with Hayden Casey, author of Show Me Where the Hurt Is.

“Writing the book was a way to reckon with my vexed relationship to girlhood, to womanness, the scripts imposed upon me. Growing up Catholic, the daughter of Polish immigrants, I struggled with inherited ideas around attractiveness and how to perform as a woman, which was culturally influenced by my upbringing. It’s an ongoing thing that poetry has allowed me to explode open. It’s connected to my questions of beauty and my draw toward beauty, my thoughts around kinship, around reaching toward other immigrant daughters, as in this book and in my life, the core beauty that friendship is, the nourishment that friendship is, all of it entangled with girlhood.”

Sarah Aziza’s memoir, The Hollow Half, was probably my favorite book of the year, so it’s fitting I end 2025 with more of her powerful writing. For LitHub, here is Al-Atlal, Now: On Language and Silence in Gaza’s Wake.

“There were so many worst parts. And this was one: how unsurprised you were. How many Palestinian lives and years have been exterminated, in the gap between words and will? Yours is not the first people prescribed erasure by and for the civilized. You know the horrific capaciousness of English. How elastic, how permeable, its morality. How swiftly it shapeshifts to violent designs.”

Thanks for reading—and have a happy and healthy holiday season,

Vesna

---

About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, children of immigrants and refugees, and others living between countries and cultures. For more info, here is a Q&A I did with Longreads about the newsletter. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.

About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then immigrated to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer for nonprofits in the human rights and international affairs fields. I have written for three anthologies (Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home; Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024; and Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023) as well as Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and Catapult, among others. I was a Writer in Residence at Hedgebrook (‘25), participated in Tin House (‘24 and ‘21) and Kenyon Review (‘24) workshops, and won the Poet & Author (‘24) and Parent Writer (‘20) fellowships from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find me on Instagram and Bluesky.