On a spring evening in 2016, the day after Donald Trump won a series of primaries cementing his candidacy, I stepped into a hushed auditorium in midtown Manhattan and found my seat. I’d decided to attend a panel discussion hosted by PEN America’s World Voices Festival [3] and was looking forward to literary conversation in place of election-cycle sound bites. The event was titled “Expats.” I’ve never identified with that word, though it’s familiar to my upbringing. I was born in Pakistan and grew up moving through different countries in southern Africa before migrating to the United States as an adult. In my childhood experience, expats were white people welcomed with red-carpet treatment, not Brown interlopers like my family and me. Even in Pakistan, my birthplace, I was a descendent of Indian refugees, and as such my identity had always been tenuous and conditional. Now, as a Muslim immigrant surrounded by the hate Trump was continuing to incite in 2016, my claim to belonging felt shakier than ever. This evening I was seeking a sense of community with immigrant writers on the panel who might share my growing unease. 

At first, the panelists took turns reflecting on their difficult relationships with the term “expat.” Author Colum McCann added to those observations, but then took a different stance on the idea of feeling foreign in the United States. “I don’t feel foreign here at all, and a lot of the people that I know, especially writers, don’t feel foreign here…. One of the things that I think [is] brave and tough and muscular, particularly about the American literary establishment, is that you are allowed to come here and to retain your foreignness…. And I think that we must applaud some of the democratic and radical experience that goes on here—that sort of radical welcoming.” 

I closed my eyes. His words sat like stones in my belly. There was something wrong about what he said. It evoked the same feeling in me as did the prevailing political narrative about immigrants. But I couldn’t immediately name the wrongness. After all, hadn’t the American literary establishment conferred its largesse on me? Here, a rich white donor fully funded my MFA in creative writing. Other benefactors sponsored residencies, scholarships. In this way, had I not been welcomed as McCann said? In between these questions, a memory: A white male classmate once told me, “You were only accepted into this prestigious MFA program because they want more people who look like you.” A different white classmate decried the “unfairness” of the diversity funding I’d received. An undercurrent ran through McCann’s words in the same little voice that had whispered to me for years: You should be grateful. 

Shifting in my hard seat, I noticed the other panelists listening politely to McCann. I wondered if my discomfort was my problem alone, not shared by writers I admired. The outsiderness I felt in this room, this literary world, this city, this country, all seemed to slide together and click shut. But then Jamaica Kincaid picked up her microphone. “You really ought to think about that,” she said. “Because I think it’s very easy for you, you’re a white man…. But, you know, in contrast to you, my experience—I didn’t feel I was just sort of stepping into this grand literature and welcoming and so on. I mean, I still don’t feel like that at all. So I would not universalize that so much. Just say, ‘Me, a white guy from Ireland, met this experience.’ And I’m really glad you had it. I don’t wish to be a white guy. But I’m glad that white guys enjoy themselves so much.”

I wanted to stand up and cheer or, better, rush the stage and embrace her. I did none of these things. After an astonished pause the other panelists broke into awkward laughter, as if a careless woman had bared an embarrassing body part best left hidden. Another writer, while affirming Kincaid’s perspective, ushered the conversation in a more diplomatic direction. 

But Kincaid had done the hard thing. She’d called out the assumption running through this white man’s words: that his privileged experience of immigrant welcome was shared by most of us. Her blunt expression was necessary to adequately acknowledge the centuries of harm this assumption contained. Harm that was suffered not only by those of us whose literary traditions were, and continue to be, excluded by the establishment, but by waves of immigrants of all professions who have also been systematically excluded from workplaces and old boys’ clubs across the country. 

Once the discussion was over I approached Kincaid to have her sign my copy of her travel memoir, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (National Geographic, 2007). Though my words felt insufficient, I managed to thank her and stumbled through an explanation of why what she’d said mattered to me. Something of my emotion must have filtered through my awkward delivery because she exclaimed, with that same earlier authority in her voice, “Write about this Muslim American experience! I encourage you to write about it.” 

At the time of the panel, I was hard at work on a novel. Set in South Africa, India, Pakistan, and New York City over the span of a century, Outside Women intertwines the narratives of two migrant women, each faced with the choice to risk her own life to pursue justice for a stranger. Both characters were unwelcome in their own communities before they left their homelands, and the novel charts their journeys to find kinship in solidarity with other outsiders.

In some ways I’ve been writing this story in my head ever since my family first moved to South Africa and I became obsessed with the history of Indians in the region. Years later, I began writing this migration story that resonated with my own childhood. I wanted to focus on migrations that did not venerate the Global North as a destination, but instead traced the journeys of people like my family who have traveled for centuries between Asia and Africa. After the 2016 election I was powered with a new urgency to get this story into the world. I completed a draft a few months later and began revisions, channeling old feelings of unbelonging that those hard years churned up. Through the revision process I came to understand what lay beneath my decades-long obsession. Writing fiction inspired by real women who’d forged their own outsider paths years before me could provide me with the sense of home I was seeking. I could choose my own ancestors from these histories. 

Eventually I was ready to find a publisher. My literary agent knocked on the door of every commercial imprint over a grueling eighteen months. None of the dozens of rejections we received provided any concrete feedback. No one wanted this book. The irony wasn’t lost on me that my novel about unwelcome outsiders was not welcome in mainstream publishing. 

This wasn’t a new experience. I’d already dealt with years of rejection in my writing life. “It’s hard to sell a story that’s set outside the U.S.,” an agent at a conference said with a wave of her hand. “Unfortunately, I just took on a Pakistani and Indian narrative,” said another agent in her rejection note. “Migration is very popular right now; you’ll have to prove you’re different,” advised an editor. Immigrant writers were interchangeable, it seemed, and there was only room for one. After Trump’s first election a group of publishing professionals set up a website where Muslim writers could directly submit their manuscripts. But two years later, when I began my search for publication, the site was already defunct. Even that flimsy welcome mat from the industry was only temporary.

I suppose I could describe myself as a writer systematically excluded by the American book publishing community at large, and yet nothing is that simple. Many immigrants without my class and education privileges have been disenfranchised from this establishment, while I’ve managed to cling to a toehold. I have the English skills, time, ability, and money to find opportunities and then apply for them over and over again. While true, this acknowledgment sounds the same refrain: You should be grateful. 

That nagging voice is familiar not just from my writing career, but also from the rest of my hyphenated Asian American and Muslim American life. When led past the empty tables to the very back of the restaurant, I should be grateful to be seated at all. When confused with my Brown coworker for the umpteenth time, I should be grateful I was even granted a work visa. When taken aside for another random security check at the airport, I should be grateful Muslims are still allowed to travel.

After taking a few months off, I decided I wasn’t quite ready to give up on my novel. I submitted it to the University Press of Kentucky’s New Poetry and Prose Series [4], which celebrates marginalized voices. A few months later, during the summer, the response I’d almost given up on arrived—Outside Women was the prose pick for the year and would be published in March 2025. Rejected by the mainstream, my novel found a home among other outsiders at a nonprofit scholarly press. It was welcomed in Appalachia, a region often outsider-ed by the elite literary world. In an irresistibly poetic turn, my writing life had come to imitate my art. My book found welcome on a path parallel to that of my characters, not inside the institutions that fail(ed) us, but in mutual aid with others on the margins. I’ve come to appreciate this path, especially when I hear from friends at mainstream publishers who struggle with editors making casual Islamophobic comments or who are given little choice in cover design and other decisions. So there it is again—you should be grateful. But it’s overly simplistic to suggest that I am better off outside mainstream publishing. After all, I need to make a living, and my advance is small. What’s more, it’s an uphill battle to get my work noticed by the audiences I value when my press lacks media contacts and a large publicity budget. Still, my words have found refuge because a panel of readers in Kentucky welcomed me. 

There’s another layer to this story. Before that August day when I received news of my manuscript’s acceptance, the state of Kentucky and I had shared only one other encounter. In late 2001, a few months after 9/11, my then partner and I were driving across the country. We stopped at a gas station and rest stop in rural Kentucky geared to long-distance truckers. Inside the convenience store I waited in line with my chosen car snacks. When it was my turn to pay, the white cashier behind the counter beckoned the person behind me. Confused, I glanced around, thinking she’d made a mistake. I stepped forward and placed my provisions on the counter. But she continued serving one customer after another, ignoring me and my repeated “excuse me.” She didn’t look at me; she didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

I don’t remember a lot beyond that, only that I ended up shouting at her, and my partner dragged me from the store as truckers outside stared while filling their tanks. Two of them took a few, slow steps closer. Their expressions were grim. I don’t remember running, or the tires screeching, but I know we got out of there fast. I remember the cashier’s face. 

Almost twenty-five years after escaping it, I’m curious about Kentucky—and Appalachia—again. I’m learning about this region by reading books by Indigenous, immigrant, queer, and trans writers such as Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s Even as We Breathe (Fireside Industries, 2020), Neema Avashia’s Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (West Virginia University Press, 2022), and the anthology To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers, edited by Rae Garringer (University Press of Kentucky, 2025). All of these are voices from the margins I’m able to access because of my press and others like it. I’d turned my back on Kentucky, but these stories help me decipher the many layers of my reception in this country. And in conversation through our books, the writers of these stories offer me the community I’ve been seeking. 

I’ve now lived in America long enough to know that I was foolish not to have left the Kentucky rest stop quietly. I know we were lucky to get away unharmed. But I’m not grateful. I can accept the gifts I’ve been given in this country with grace and acknowledge the privileges I enjoy that contribute to those gifts. And without losing grasp of that privileged reality, I can also voice what I deserve and did not receive: the true welcome of my being, body, and story. The same welcome deserved by every stranger looking in from the outside.

Roohi Choudhry was born in Pakistan and grew up in southern Africa. Author of the novel Outside Women (University Press of Kentucky, 2025), she holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship as well as residencies at Hedgebrook and Djerassi. She has written for the United Nations and worked as a researcher in criminal justice reform and public health, and she currently facilitates creative writing workshops for community organizations. Choudhry lives in Brooklyn, New York. Find her at roohichoudhry.com [5].