title: The Syria Dispatches: Literary Nonfiction about the Search for Syrian Refugees
author: Ming Lauren Holden
description: Winner of Bellingham Reviews 49th Parallel Poetry Award, Chattahoochee Reviews Lamar York Nonfiction Prize and Glimmer Trains Family Matters Fiction Prize, Ming Holden was invited by the United States Embassy to Suriname on a diplomatic speaking engagement under the U.S. Speakers Program for Womens History Month in 2014. In 2011, she founded the Survival Girls, a self-sustaining theater group for young Congolese women in the slums of Nairobi. Her book about the experience, the nonfiction novella The Survival Girls, came out in 2013 through Wolfram Productions. Ming also won the USAID worldwide essay contest for inclusion in the USAID Frontiers in Development publication alongside work by Bill Gates, Indra Noori, Paul Collier, and others. Her essay about the Survival Girls got some love from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself in the books introduction! (Mings writing about the Girls was also nominated for the AWP Intro Award for Nonfiction.) Ming served the Mongolian Writers Union as its first-ever International Relations Adviser during her year as a Henry Luce Scholar in Mongolia and worked towards the formation of a Mongolia PEN Center. She has since returned to Mongolia to work for The Asia Foundation on a literary translation and advocated for an exiled Chinese writer in Turkey at the Writers and Literary Translators International Congress 2010, where she was the youngest presenter and one of the only Americans. Ming is also the recipient of the Herman Wells Graduate Fellowship, Indiana Universitys most competitive graduate award, designated for leadership abilities, character, social consciousness, and generosity of spirit, and the Woon-Joon Yoon Memorial Fellowship, for students who have exemplified tolerance and understanding across racial and religious lines through service, personal commitment, academic achievement and future potential. Mings nonfiction has also placed as a finalist or runner-up for the annual nonfiction prizes at Arts &amp; Letters, Passages North, Ruminate, December Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review. Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, photography, and literary translations have also appeared in The Daily Beast, Alchemy, Box Of Jars, Cerise Press, The Best American Poetry Blog, Haydens Ferry Review, The Huffington Post, Molotov Cocktail, Peaches and Bats, The Poker, Prospect, The Rumpus, the Santa Ynez Valley Journal, the Santa Barbara Independent, Slice Magazines blog, and others.
zlib_text: > THE LAST SAFE PLACE
  
  > A novel by
  
  > Ray M. Schultze
  
  > Copyright 2018 Ray M. Schultze
  
  All rights reserved
  
  > To LEAH,
  
   _With pride in her accomplishments_
  
  > ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  
  My experience traveling through Austria was invaluable in fashioning _The Last
  Safe Place_ but in the end represented a small portion of the research I did
  to cloak the story in reality. I found the most compelling accounts of the
  Syrian refugee crisis in the boots-on-the-ground reporting by journalists and
  aid workers. Among other useful sources were the following books. On the
  subject of Syria: _Inside Syria_ by Reese Erlich, _Damascus—Taste of a City_
  by Marie Fadel and Rafik Schami, _The Gates of Damascus_ by Lieve Joris, and
  _Culture and Customs of Syria_ by John A. Shoup; on the artist Klimt and
  Austria: _The Lady in Gold_ by Anne-Marie O’Connor, _Gustav Klimt—Art Nouveau
  Visionary_ by Eva di Stefano, _Klimt_ by Gilles Neret, _A Concise History of
  Austria_ by Steven Beller, and _The Austrians_ by Gordon