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When the U.S. consular officer grinned and offered her hearty congratulations on my award nomination, I almost believed my visa interview might turn out differently than I’d anticipated.
“Such a huge accomplishment!” she said, beaming.
I’d been preparing for the interview for weeks, rehearsing my answers to every question I could imagine. My hand rested on a stack of transparent dossiers, each color-coded for quick access. One, marked with a yellow label, held my statement of purpose, explaining that my memoir, “Huna,” was a finalist for the 2026 National Book Award for Nonfiction and that I was expected to attend the finalist reading and award ceremony in New York in mid-November. Behind it, another dossier with an orange label contained my publisher’s invitation letter, my confirmed itinerary, and a sheet of contact information for the publisher and the National Book Foundation.
If I was asked about my history of political incarceration, I would reach for blue: the prison folder. It contained court documents, a case file from a Geneva-based human-rights organization, and a 2023 New York Times article about my six years as a political prisoner in post-revolution Egypt, the subject of my memoir. I was prepared to explain how I had been jailed as a teen-ager for protesting the 2013 military coup, given a fifteen-year sentence, and released in 2020, after one of my family’s many appeals was arbitrarily reviewed, exposing that I had been wrongfully tried as an adult instead of as a minor.
To answer questions about my ties outside the U.S., I would reach for green. That dossier held my current European residence permit, a one-year apartment lease, and confirmed U.K. and European book-tour events for the year ahead—evidence that I would leave the U.S. once my brief visit was over. I had a few more thematic dossiers, plus a final, unlabelled one for miscellaneous documents, just in case. Through it all, one anxious thought swirled in my head: Please don’t ask me about politics. Please don’t ask me why I left the U.S.
When my turn came, I stepped up to the window and deployed a persona that I’d refined over countless visa interviews and “chats” with border-control officers: open posture, steady eye contact, an easy smile with just the right amount of earnestness. I had to be prepared enough to show I had a legitimate reason to visit and enough funds, but not so prepared, so eager, that I came across as someone with something to hide. Desperate people, after all, are the ones who overstay their visas or, God forbid, immigrate. The trick was to exude the nonchalance of having nothing to prove while making absolutely sure that I proved everything.
The interview began more smoothly than I’d expected. One by one, the suspicions attached to my passport seemed to fall away. The consular officer nodded at the Penguin Random House letterhead, the printout of the National Book Foundation web page; appeared reassured that my flights and accommodation were fully covered; squinted and nodded at my European residence permit. Even my political incarceration took up less space in the conversation than I’d feared. The tension in her eyes seemed to ease as she saw the Times logo and profile.
She typed a few words into her computer, then scrolled down her screen. Her expression tightened.
“Unfortunately, I can’t decide on this application now. We have to consult Washington first, then get back to you.”
My stomach dropped. She told me that I’d be placed in administrative processing and that the decision would be e-mailed once she heard back from Washington. I thanked her and went home. The next morning, I woke to a formal visa denial in my inbox. They wouldn’t put in writing what the system had flagged or the reason that Washington provided overnight, only that I was found ineligible for a visitor visa under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Years ago, in my prison cell in Egypt, I used to fantasize about writing a memoir. I would slip under a bright red duvet my mother had bribed the guards to let through, and imagine that everything happening to me would end up in a book. That a guard’s baton was battering not my ribs but those of the book’s protagonist. That a slap was landing on the protagonist’s face, not mine. I was the author, concerned only with how I would render the torture my body was undergoing on the page.
For six years and three months, I wrote steadily, smuggling the pages out one visit at a time. I started reading contraband books with an eye for craft, trying to reverse engineer the lines that lingered and emulate their moves. The scribbles on a smuggled page became a potential essay, the essay a potential published article, the article a book. I would imagine it winning an award. Hours passed as I delivered fictional acceptance speeches under Mama’s duvet, revising and honing them, fleetingly unincarcerated. Prison was my horizon, but this fantasy, despite the unhealthy dissociation from my body it entailed, helped. And in prison, if something helps, you keep doing it.
After my release, I kept writing, publishing essays and political commentary about my experience and that of politically incarcerated friends, many of whom are still behind bars. Before long, well-connected relatives warned me that my name was circulating as a potential target for rearrest. I fled Egypt that same year and began working on my book while moving constantly between countries in search of the next visa, for a semblance of home. Then, in 2022, I received a full ride to pursue an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
The three years I spent at Pitt were crucial to the creation of my book. I made a home, found my people, and built a warm, tender literary community, one I lean on to this day. The M.F.A. also offered more tangible assistance: access to legal status, funds, mobility, access. I applied for swaths of research and travel grants, attended every literary conference I could, spoke on every stage, and put myself and my developing book in every room. I was building a life, but I was also stocking the color-coded dossiers I carried everywhere, assembling evidence that I was extraordinary enough to be allowed to keep that life.
In 2023, I found a literary agent and worked more intensely toward a full manuscript. I was disheartened to learn that only U.S. citizens could submit to major literary awards such as the Pulitzer and the National Book Awards. But, following years of advocacy by the organization Undocupoets and by writers such as the Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced, in 2023, that it would expand the eligibility criteria for some categories, opening the award to authors with permanent residence, or whose primary, long-term home was in the United States. The National Book Foundation followed suit in 2024. The fantasy that had sustained me under my mother’s prison duvet for years was suddenly within reach.
Meanwhile, I worried about what would happen once my student visa expired. When the offer for “Huna” from Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House, landed in my inbox in 2024, my agent called. Her first words were a thrilled “Congratulations”; my first words, breathless: “Can they write me a letter for an O-1 extraordinary-ability visa?”
After Trump returned to power in 2025, ICE was unleashed against immigrant communities and pro-Palestine international students. In the aftermath of October 7th, I had attended rallies on campus and written political commentary for outlets such as Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. I had criticized the relationship between Egypt and the U.S., and argued that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza—a position I believe should never have needed to be defended—and that this must fundamentally alter our understanding of international law. I knew that my activism put me at risk of being arrested.
My sense of risk escalated as I watched Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national and Tufts Ph.D. student, get snatched off the street by ICE agents near her home, for co-authoring an op-ed relating to Gaza. I consulted lawyers who warned me that, given my public profile, my arrest was likely a matter of time. Concerned as I was about ICE detention, deportation to Egypt carried an even more terrifying prospect: imprisonment for the rest of my life.
I spent the month of April, 2025, revising my book behind the locked door of my apartment. I deactivated some of my social-media accounts and made others private. I cancelled readings and speaking engagements. My friends Kira, Miles, and laura scanned the street around my apartment every day, trying to make sure it was clear of undercover ICE agents before sneaking me into their cars like contraband. One day, I caught myself wondering what I wanted to be wearing when ICE came to my door. At that moment, I recognized the logic of the system that I had fled to the U.S. to escape—one in which speaking and writing openly made you a target and the possibility of imprisonment reorganized the smallest routines of daily life.
I knew then that I had to uproot my life again. I left the U.S. in late April and resettled in Europe, entering what I hoped would be a temporary exile within my exile. I attended my M.F.A. graduation remotely, and lost the chance to tour the country for my book, to celebrate with the people who had become my people.
When I learned that “Huna” had been long-listed for the National Book Award, and, weeks later, received a call from a 212 number telling me I was a finalist for the award, my joy was tempered by the fact that I could not share the experience with the friends who had witnessed the book’s journey. This visitor-visa application was my last stab at a homecoming—if only for a few days.
Visas, awards, travel: these are the problems of an unincarcerated person. As a seventeen-year-old boy shrinking in the corner of a cell, I fantasized about a day when these would be my problems. Back then, a life beyond prison, where my dreams could be crushed in this way, was itself the dream. This is why I write about those I left behind: Ayman, whose brown eyes creased as he joked torture away in our cell; Tooha, whose gap-toothed smile shone as he held me in Wadi Al-Natroun prison after our appeal was rejected; Adel, whose laugh buoyed me as we shouted through the peepholes in our cell doors, keeping each other company through the night. I dream that they, too, might be afforded a life in which stacking their color-coded dossiers is their most pressing concern. Still, there is a particular cruelty to being forced to outrun the fruits of one’s labor, to watch one’s work bloom from afar. My book has made it into rooms that I never will. I don’t know what to do with that, and so I write. ♦