For the past decade I have been based in Los Angeles, where I’ve worked as a writer and translator focused on increasing the visibility of writers and communities yet to be represented in English. I’ve worked with the persecuted Chakma of Bangladesh to the displaced Batwa of Burundi, the indigenous Zapotec poets of Southern Mexico to the socially-engaged cartoonists of Malabo. In 2013, I founded the nonprofit publishing house Phoneme Media, which has since published over thirty books translated from twenty-five different languages, including the first-ever literary translations from languages like Lingala and Uyghur.

Compelled by the opportunity to learn more about a region actively occupied by the United States my entire adult life—and to experience the fullness of life here so often stripped of its richness in Western media depictions—I relocated to Iraqi Kurdistan on September 1, where I am now Artist in Residence at Kashkul, an arts and research collaborative housed at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). My young Kurdish colleagues at Kashkul pursue projects of their own design—ranging from Crux, a study of when Islamic devotion turns to radicalism and whether it can be turned back, to Mosul Lives, an oral history project that gathers stories about life in Mosul before both the occupation of Isis and the U.S. invasion of 2003—in order to imagine what the city might become again. While working on my own writing projects, I’ve already been able to befriend emerging Ezidi poets, discuss Duchamp and Lorca with stateless Rhojelati artists, and meet Mosul’s “Sheikh of Calligraphy.”

In this yearlong column for The Logger, I will share stories of recent rebirth and ongoing resistance, a broader and more nuanced coverage of the individuals and organizations who embrace a determined optimism for the future while acknowledging the limitations and challenges of the present. Inasmuch as possible, I hope to fade into the background, an observer considerate of my complex position in this context, decidedly committed to showcasing local protagonists and their stories.

—David Shook

Much has been written about the courageous rebuilding of the Iraqi libraries destroyed by the Islamic State during its occupation of Mosul and other cities in the region. In adjacent Kurdish Iraq, the centuries-old struggle to build a repository of Kurdish culture and history has primarily and often necessarily continued with little visibility or fanfare, undertaken by willful idealists and brave individualists. Recently, I visited Zheen Archive Center, and met the people making that dream a reality. Here, two optimistic, broadminded brothers and an all-women team of crack manuscript preservationists are building a collection of...