No One Knows You Until They Hear Your Story

A conversation with Merna Hecht on teaching refugee and immigrant students

Merna Hecht is a nationally known storyteller, teaching artist, poet, essayist, and longtime human rights, immigrant, and refugee rights activist. In 2009 she founded the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project at Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington. In the years since, Stories of Arrival has received national recognition for creating a broader public awareness of refugee and immigrant stories through the publication of anthologies featuring her students’ poetry and artwork. She is now carrying on this work under the auspices of a new program called Word Travels: Bringing Refugee and Immigrant Voices to the Community, which includes a project called Uplifting Voices, designed to record and broadcast the stories of refugees and immigrants told in their own voices.