Connie Shoemaker, the 2020 CBA Winner in General Nonfiction, developed an interest in Muslim women while spending four years in Cairo, Egypt with her husband and children, teaching English and writing for the Associated Press. More than half of Shoemaker’s life has been focused on education of international students and immigrants. She co-founded and directed Spring International Language Center, an intensive ESL program, and serves on the board of Immigrant Pathways Colorado.

Taste the Sweetness Later is informed by more than 200 hours of personal interviews. In the book, Shoemaker shares stories of two women living in the grip of dangerous dictators. Nisren, a Kurdish Iraqi whose childhood is plagued by Saddam Hussein’s “eyes that are watching,” marries an interpreter for the US Army. She escapes to America with her family after anti-US factions threaten to kill her husband. Eman, a Libyan growing up in the shadow of Muammar Gaddafi, persists in her dream of higher education by fighting for a scholarship that will take her from her sheepherding family of twenty-two siblings to graduate study in the United States.

Join us for the final event in our Celebrate Colorado Authors series, co-sponsored with the Colorado Humanities Foundation and the Friends of the Lyons Library!

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