Visionary Leader Luma Mufleh talks about LEARNING AMERICA with Amy Butcher!

2424 East Main Street,Columbus OH 43209

11 April, 2022

Description

Visionary Luma Mufleh talks with Amy Butcher about Learning America: One Woman's Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children. Join visionary leader Luma Mufleh, in conversation with noted memoirist Amy Butcher, to learn about Luma’s powerful personal story, Learning America: One Woman's Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children: how she grew a soccer team into a nationally acclaimed network of schools. This free event will be held at Gramercy Books. Masks and proof of full vaccination are required to attend. Registration closes at 6pm the day of the event. Ohio Wesleyan University’s Education Department is Gramercy’s Community Partner for this author evening. Luma Mufleh—a Muslim woman, a gay refugee from hyper-conservative Jordan—joins a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia. The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia and Afghanistan and Sudan, have attended local schools for years. Drawn in as coach of a ragtag but fiercely competitive team, Mufleh discovers that few of her players can read a word. She asks, “Where was the America that took me in? That protected me? How can I get these kids to that America?” For readers of Malala, Paul Tough, and Bryan Stevenson, Learning America is the moving and insight-packed story of how Luma Mufleh grew a soccer team into a nationally acclaimed network of schools—by homing in laser like on what traumatized students need to learn. Fugees accepts only those most in need: students recruit other students, and all share a background of war, poverty, and trauma. No student passes a grade without earning it; the failure of any student is the responsibility of all. Most foundational, everyone takes art and music, and everyone plays soccer, areas where students make the leaps that can and must happen—as this gifted refugee activist convinces—even for America’s most left-behind. Luma Mufleh is the founder of Fugees Family, with schools now in Georgia and Ohio and an expanding footprint bringing educational equity to refugee resettlement communities across America. Her TED Talk on educational justice for refugee families was viewed more than 1.7 million times. “Luma Mufleh brings her full self to her work, and now, in these pages, to telling the remarkable story of Fugees Family. Our shared American story comes to life in this compelling book.” —Laurene Powell Jobs Amy Butcher is a highly recognized and widely published essayist (Granta, New York Times, Washington Post, The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, Guernica, and others) and the author of Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America and Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder. She is the director of creative writing and an associate professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. Gramercy Books is a locally-owned, independently-minded neighborhood bookstore located in the heart of Bexley, Ohio (just outside of downtown Columbus) that opened in December of 2016. Inspiration and discovery through books is cultivated in a variety of events throughout the year that include author visits and festivals, book signings, poetry readings, a monthly book club, and songwriter performances. Gramercy Books shares space with Kittie’s bakery café.