Visiting Author – Stephanie Saldaña – What We Remember Will Be Saved

Join us on Friday, October 18th at 5:30 as we welcome author Stephanie Saldaña! She will be presenting her book What We Remember Will Be Saved, a portrait of Syrian and Iraqi refugees and the belongings they carry. We’ll see you there!

Order a copy of What We Remember Will Be Saved HERE!

About the Book:
2023 Christopher Award Winner
2024 Excellence in Religion Reporting Award Winner for Nonfiction

Eggplant seeds, a lullaby in a vanishing language, an embroidered dress. When people flee their homes, the things they save speak of beauty and suffering and the indomitable human spirit. In an era of mass migration in which more than 100 million people are displaced comes this lyrical portrait of Syrian and Iraqi refugees and the belongings they carry. What We Remember Will Be Saved is a book of hope, home, and the stories we hold within us when everything else has been lost. Journalist and scholar Stephanie Saldaña, who lived in Syria before the war, sets out on a journey across nine countries to meet refugees and learn what they salvaged from the ruins when they escaped. Now, in the narratives of six extraordinary women and men, from Mt. Sinjar to Aleppo to Lesvos to Amsterdam, we discover that the little things matter a great deal. Saldaña introduces us to a woman who saved her city in a dress, a musician who saved his stories in songs, and a couple who rebuilt their destroyed pharmacy even as the city around them fell apart. Together they provide a window into a religiously diverse corner of the Middle East on the edge of unraveling, and the people keeping it alive with their stories. Born of years of friendship and reporting, What We Remember Will Be Saved is a breathtaking, elegiac odyssey into the heart of the largest refugee crisis in modern history. It reminds us that refugees are storytellers and speakers of vanishing languages, and of how much history can be distilled into a piece of fabric, or eggplant seeds. What we salvage tells our story. What we remember will be saved.

About the Author:
Stephanie Saldaña is a journalist and religion scholar from San Antonio, Texas, who has spent most of the last twenty years living in the Middle East. Saldaña studied religion at Harvard Divinity School and is the author of A Country Between and The Bread of Angels, hailed by Geraldine Brooks as “a remarkable, wise, and lovely book.” Her work has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, America Magazine, and Plough, and she has been featured on National Public Radio. Saldaña and her family split their time between Bethlehem and France.

Praise:
“This outstanding book from essayist and author Saldana puts names and faces on several emigrants from Iraq and Syria, emphasizing their distinctiveness….Readers won’t soon forget the compelling stories of these brave individuals, revealed so poignantly by Saldana’s beautiful writing.” —Booklist, starred review

“Throughout this compassionate book, the author demonstrates the resilience of refugees, who carry with them their precious languages, cultures, and memories. Memorable personal stories that give much-needed depth and humanity to what are otherwise merely numbers.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Stephanie Saldaña long ago proved herself a poetic and perceptive essayist. In this book, she also proves herself a courageous one. Following refugees into the darkest and most dangerous spaces of recent history, she documents journeys that are about much more than bare survival, at once wrenching and radiant.” —Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

“Amid the ashes of war and unimaginable losses in Iraq and Syria, there is beauty, to which Stephanie Saldaña bears witness in this indelible work that should be read widely and deeply.” —Rubén Degollado, author of The Family Izquierdo