Alia Malek is Senior Staff Writer at Al Jazeera America. She is a civil rights lawyer and journalist who has lived and worked in the U.S., Lebanon, the West Bank, Syria, and Italy. She is the author of A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold through Arab-American Lives and the editor of Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustice. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, The Columbia Journalism Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s.