Shawket Barwary 

Shawket Barwary is a Kurdish American, born in Orman (now Iraqi Kurdistan), Northern Iraq, in 1977. Given Saddam Hussein's atrocities against the Kurds in the 1980s, he and his family fled to Turkey after his village was attacked. Coming back when the United Nations declared his home a no-fly zone, he grew up in Darkar, where he helped French and American NGOs in their assistance to the local people. He later relocated to the United States in 1996. He is the author of two previous books: Voices over the Mountains: Story of a Kurdish Refugee (2016) and Land of the Rising Sun: The Way of the Kurd (2017). He currently works as a Guest Representative at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in St. Louis, where he resides with his wife and three children