Reimagine Resilience: Storytelling as a Portal to Prevention

Dr. Sabic-El-Rayess – award-winning author, scholar, and professor at Columbia University – centers storytelling at the heart of scholarship, research, and work across America in service of building belonging and nurturing resilience to hate across communities. Dr. Sabic-El-Rayess released her second nonfiction contribution, Three Summers (Macmillan Publishers-FSG, 2024) to critical acclaim. Three Summers is a story of resilience, belonging, and sisterhood in the three years leading up to the Bosnian Genocide. Her first nonfiction contribution, The Cat I Never Named (Bloomsbury, 2020) is widely taught in K-12 classrooms across the United States of America and is the recipient of numerous literary accolades. In this session, Dr. Sabic-El-Rayess will spotlight the power of storytelling in nurturing belonging and offer insights on why she chooses – among her scholarly, research, and pedagogical endeavors – to continue writing stories as a way to sustainably build resilience to hate.