Dr. Diya Abdo
Dr. Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College and the founding Director of Every Campus A Refuge. A second-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Jordan, Dr. Abdo’s teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers and Arab and Islamic feminisms as well as refugee and immigrant issues. She has also published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her book AMERICAN REFUGE: True Stories of the Refugee Experience, published by Steerforth Press in 2022, was selected by the North Carolina Humanities as a North Carolina 2024 Reads Book. In 2015, inspired by Pope Francis' call on every European parish to host one refugee family, Dr. Abdo founded Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. Dr. Abdo is the recipient of the Emerson Collective Fellowship (2024), the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize (2021), and several higher education and community engagement awards. Dr. Abdo sits on the Advisory Board of the Community Sponsorship Hub. She lives in Greensboro, N.C., with her partner and two daughters.