Biba Ghaifan was born in Sudan and came to the United States at the age of nine.  She came as a refugee, and started pursuing education and a better life.  She attended Grand Island Senior High in Grand Island, Nebraska, and graduated in May of 2014.  She then moved to Lincoln, NE to pursue higher education.  She discovered No-Limits International Christian Center (NICC) in 2015, where she began attending church regularly. She enrolled at Southeast Community College, then transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for Child, Youth, and Family Study, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in May of 2020.  At NICC, she met Jesus, and her life has been transformed.  She pursues Him more and more, daily.  She enjoys writing poems in her free time, and also met a wonderful lady at NICC who wrote poems, who inspired her to become a published author.

 

Precious Life – Released in 2021

Author – Nawaf Haskan

Nawaf Ashur Haskan is a Yazidi poet, originally from Iraq.  While living in the Washington, DC area, he was a research fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy.  He is currently an administrative consultant with Youth Bridges, an NGO based in Iraq.  In 2016, Nawaf worked as a cultural advisor and translator for RYOT and the Huffington Post.  From 2015 to 2016, he served as a business development officer for the International Organization for Migration. Before graduating from the American University of Iraq–Sulaimani (AUIS), he founded several youth-based civic education initiatives in the Sinjar district of Ninewa province, where he sought to strengthen the principles of pluralism through regular workshops in local villages. From 2005 to 2008, he worked as an interpreter for US Troops in Iraq.  

Nawaf grew up in Sinjar on his grandfather’s farm.  Together, the family cultivated vegetables, planted and maintained an orchard, and tended their sheep and cattle. With his grandparents’ passing, his father and uncles needed help on the farm from him and his five brothers, all still school-age.  The boys devised a rotation: each year, one boy would postpone his coursework to help on the farm, allowing the other five brothers to continue with their education.  Nawaf himself delayed school three different years until he finished high school.  Together, the family made each mud-brick and erected every wall of the family’s twelve-room farmhouse.  In 2014, when the Islamic State (IS) arrived in his province, they blew it up.

As a poet, Nawaf has featured what happened to his people and community.  He also addresses the kind of life that he has to deal with in a foreign country.  “Whenever I write a poem,” he says, “it’s because I have faced and deeply felt a situation.”  So, he says, “My poems will change based on the person I am when I write them.  The same person can be many different people.”

Country of God – Released in 2021

Nawaf Haskan has captured the deep sense of loss and horrors of war in this poignant collection of poetry.  The reader will be inspired by his courage and ability to find hope in the midst of tragedy. Available on amazon.com for $12.99 plus tax, shipping and handling.