Alia Malek[/caption]Our latest podcast–Episode 2 features an interview with Alia Malek–she is an award-winning journalist and civil rights lawyer. She is the author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria and A Country Called Amreeka and editor of Patriot Acts and EUROPA. Her reporting has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Nation, and Christian Science Monitor, among others.
Eliza Griswold writing a front cover review of the book for the New York Times Book Review writes,” Now, as the war grinds into its seventh horrifying year, literature written in English and borne out of the conflict is finally beginning to reach the rest of the world.”
Alia Malek’s memoir, “The Home That Was Our Country,” is one of the finest examples of this new testimonial writing.”

In this episode we also continue our discussion of D Watkins’s “Crack Rock” Memoir, The Cook Up. We discuss D’s handling of his early success as a Baltimore drug dealer and the pressures on him to get clean and enter a new less dangerous life. We continue to find the writing and narrative compelling as Watkins takes us through an unusual and under reported journey through Baltimore’s deadly back streets and alleyways.