I wrote Home of the Brave when I was living in Minneapolis, and there was a huge influx of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa. And I had a very low tolerance for cold. I love Minneapolis. It’s the best town in the world. If you could pick it up and put it in, say, L.A., it would be perfect.
But I saw these people coming, and I thought, “How are you learning a new language, and a new culture and putting up with 14-foot snowdrifts?” It was miraculous to me. I moved around a lot as a kid. Not that I would in any way equate my experience, but I knew that feeling of being new, and to me, the experience of immigrants who come to this country, and refugees and start from scratch is fascinating, and moving, and just amazingly brave.
So I wanted to write about it. And I did a lot of research. I talked to refugee resettlement people, and all kinds of refugees who had come to that area. And many years later, I had a woman from Sudan who wrote me and said—and it was very simple, she just said, “You wrote my life.” And I thought, “That’s just the highest praise imaginable.”