Congratulations to 2024 LANDO grantee Elena Dudum, whose memoir They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful is now forthcoming from One Signal Publishers!
“What does reclaiming identity mean? How does one hold all of the anger, beauty, and pain that comes with diasporic inheritance? In her deeply personal and incisive memoir, Elena Dudum reckons with what it means to be Palestinian today and interrogates the interior lives of Arab-Americans. We follow Elena from California to New York, Ramallah to the Jordan River, as she navigates Zionist institutions and rehabilitates her relationship to her homeland. Amidst the ongoing genocide in Palestine, They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful is a necessary call to action against institutional silencing, censorship, and prejudice.” – from One Signal Publishers
This is especially exciting, as this is the project for which Elena was awarded a LANDO grant!
Learn more on Elena’s instagram, @elena_dudum