"I have a recording from the night I walked a street in central Tunis almost thirteen years ago. It is a few minutes long—a mess of car horns and people chanting in Arabic, a language I don’t speak. The date is October 20, 2011, and the people are celebrating the death of Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled Libya from 1969 until he was assassinated that morning."

“Believe me, I never wanted to go to Masala Chaat House. I passed it every day, a cramped one-room restaurant sandwiched between two printing shops on Kampala's bustling Nasser Road.”

“In 2017, I visited Fukushima on a travel grant from Columbia University’s MFA program to research why, six years after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami ravaged the eastern coast of Japan, 35,000 individuals continued to live in temporary housing. The small, prefabricated houses spread across the greater Fukushima Prefecture were quickly deteriorating. Tens of thousands of Japanese were in limbo, news sources insisted.”

“I was born into Christianity as I was born into America. In my childhood, there was the church and the diaspora, and I could not imagine one without the other.”

“The essence of design is just to express who you are, or express a view you have of the world. For me, it’s also about the sense for craftsmanship.”

“When she tasted a Cuban banana, her eyes widened, her mouth puckered, she cocked her head and looked at the bowl, the tree, my face, back to the bowl and to the banana inside of it.”

I fell in love with the thin country, but what I didn’t say is that I also fell in love with a Chilean.