I began writing fiction seriously at 18 years old. I worked full-time. I lived alone. I wasn’t in college because I couldn’t afford it, just like I couldn’t afford a phone, computer, or internet connection. I wrote to escape the drudgery of poverty. I wrote to create something compelling, if only for myself. But at that point, I’d never read or heard of any fiction about people like me—a multiracial Syrian, Mvskoke genderqueer kid raised in a predominantly White exurb on the east end of the Rust Belt—so I only wrote about characters presumed to be White.

Like all writers, I began my career as a reader. Once I read beyond the White literary establishment, my writing followed suit. Reading Zeyn Joukhadar, Gloria Anzaldúa, June Jordan, Nella Larsen, Etel Adnan, Lorraine Hansberry, Cathy Park Hong, Claudia Rankine, Paisley Rekdal, and many others who’ve written radical art that reflects the fullness of their existence, I knew I had to do the same. With fiction, I’m forever worried I’ll get it wrong, but Toni Morrison describes the thrill of the attempt: “How compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for all of the values they bring to their art.”

So, at this stage in my career, I’m immensely grateful for the fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts because it allows me to prioritize the project I’ve long been working on, a novel about America that demands we acknowledge the land of the free is a glorified cage. Rendering the widespread material consequences of a society dependent on surveillance and mass incarceration, I’ll depict the challenges facing imprisoned Black, Arab, and Indigenous women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people, alongside the methods of countersurveillance they devise to center their needs, oppose state violence, and find ways to thrive.