2024-2025 SJSU Steinbeck Fellow Abdelrahman ElGendy has been forced to flee the United States under threat of the Trump administration deportation policy. For the clearest explanation of Gendy’s situation I encourage you to read his piece recently published in The Nation entitled “Why I Had to Flee the United States.”

Before coming to the U.S., Gendy, while still a teenager, became a political activist in Egypt where, specifically, he protested that despotic regime, which according to Human Rights Watch "relies on naked coercion and the military and security services as [its] main vehicles of control.” Gendy was imprisoned for 6 years in Egypt for his activism.

Upon his release, he came to the U.S. and enrolled in an MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Pittsburgh in order to gain the tools to tell his story. And in the years since, he’s published extensively in the Washington Post and other major venues and has received the European Union’s 2025 Samir Kassir Award for Freedom of the Press. His memoir Huna will be published by Penguin Random House in 2026.

Yet, despite all this brilliant work, Gendy is not the kind of immigrant to these shores that the Trump regime appreciates. Gendy came here to think and to write and to speak freely, which means thinking and writing and speaking critically— the very basis of the university and of the examined life. He would not play the role of the ever-grateful immigrant owing everything to and expecting nothing of his adopted nation. Rather, he speaks to what the writer Laila Lalami calls the “conditional citizenship” that people of color in America have lived under for centuries and to the precarious position of immigrants who are not at present citizens, as well as the role that the U.S. and other world powers play in the displacement and precarity of indigenous populations the world over.

In view of what’s happened with Gendy and this regime’s policy of disappearing so many whom it disagrees with— frankly, in the face of vast governmental and financial power— we as educators must assert the power of our calling, the importance of open dialogue, of free scholarly inquiry, critical examination and conclusion, the value of the arts in connecting us globally and centering our shared humanity. More so now than ever.

And lastly, let me simply say, I stand with Abdelrahman ElGendy wherever he is.— (SJSU MLK Library, 5/13/25)