Haute Dish: Voices of Resilience
Students in the Twin Cities Speak Post ICE Raids

This month’s feature is an interview by David-Elijah Nahmod with Stephanie Major, the Editor of Haute Dish: Voices of Resilience. Students speak out about post-ICE raids.

It’s been a rough year for the citizens of Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul. ICE, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, invaded the area this past winter and deported hundreds of residents, many of whom were here legally. Families were broken up, with ICE even resorting to violence, killing two young Minneapolis residents, Renne Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, neither of whom was an immigrant. The residents of the Twin Cities took to the streets in anger, loudly condemning both the killings of Good and Pretti, as well as the deportations.

Now, students at Metro State University in St. Paul have responded to the horrors that ICE brought to the area in a new anthology titled Voices of Resilience. In this collection of poems, memoir pieces, and fiction, the students have written eloquently about the endurance of the human spirit. The book poses the question, what does it take to survive, and what does that survival leave behind?

Voices of Resilience was edited by Stephanie Major, a lesbian and full-time student at Metro State, where she studies creative writing and digital marketing. She is a poet, writing as Stephanie Althea West, and is mom to two young women, and, as she puts it, an “opinionated” cat.

Click HERE to read David’s interview with Stephanie Major.