Haili Blassingame

And it felt insane.

My mom was a federal worker.

So she was a federal worker for 38 years.

So she was getting all these emails about, show us your work.

I was a journalist at a public radio station that lost its funding.

I mean, this is what it was like.

A plane crashed into the Potomac like two weeks in.

I mean, it really felt... I was like, okay, this is one of those moments in history where, you know, D.C.

as a place was sort of ground zero for the second Trump administration.

And what...

we were going to see happen we were we were seeing it before the rest of the country in many ways and of course the most vulnerable as well around the country and so i that was i think because that was my focus i was able to just simply show things as they were um and of course the the characters have their own opinions but it really was a portrait of a period in time in a specific place

Yeah, so I, this was a very simple process.

So I just found this like organization that connected people with readers and Fatin was, I sort of gave her the gist of the book and I sent her the sections that had Anwar, who is the Palestinian character in the book.

And I told her what I was looking for.

Like, it's just like, let me know if there's anything that feels untrue that, you know, sticks out to you.

I mean, the real thing is,

I feel like as a Black writer, I was able to write that character because the most important thing is that they're a person first.

So you're not centering their identity in the way that they talk.

They're not always talking about their oppression.

I was able to draw from that what would sort of off-put me.