Good morning, my friends. Today, I am excited to share something very close to my heart: my debut novella, A Family of Seven and One T.V., is now available for preorder. This story grew from years of working closely with refugee communities in the Middle East, shaped by the stories, laughter, and grief we have shared. It invites readers to see these communities with softer, more loving eyes. This novella is a light-hearted comedy told through nine segments, capturing the r

My father, Lal Zereh, came to California twice in his life. The first time, he was a teenage exchange student from Afghanistan — full of curiosity, living with an American family, learning what the world looked like from the outside. The second time, he came as a refugee. The Soviets had taken his homeland. He packed up our family and started over at 43 — from nothing. But here is what the newspaper didn't say: He chose California specifically. Not by accident. Not just

“Form began to soften at the edges; the sense of ‘my’ body expanded into the space around it until inside and outside were no longer clearly divided. What remained was one continuous body of presence, appearing as fifteen people in a room.”

A people’s letter from Iran, Afghanistan, and the borderlands, this piece sits with Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s warning about Gharbzadegi and asks what liberation means when it is imposed from above versus awakened from within. It is a meditation on tyrants and martyrs, Western “saviors,” and the quiet, vast freedom that still breathes beneath our borders and our hardest days.

“No More Girls”: How Afghan Daughters Are Being Erased from Public Life

Enhanced Version: Stewardship, Dignity, and a Lineage Older Than Doctrine Long before religion wore names, humans already knew—they were not owners of the world, but guests within it. The Islamic teaching of khalifa is not a new revelation. It is a remembering—an echo of an ancient human responsibility that has traveled through nomadic memory, Zoroastrian ethics, and Islamic consciousness.