Book Talk: Our Hearts Burned for Home

Join us for a conversation about Emily Feng’s new book, Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria’s Civil War.

Currently a White House correspondent for NPR, Emily Feng spent many years as an international correspondent for the network, covering China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and conflict zones in the Middle East. She and the Wall Street Journal’s Natasha Khan will discuss how Feng came to write her new book—the first to feature in-person, in-depth interviews with the Uyghur militant community in Syria; how her years of reporting in the region helped her make the necessary connections to the Uyghurs featured in the book; and what she hopes her work will reveal about this little-understood community in exile.

Copies of Our Hearts Burned for Home we be available for sale at the event.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.   Register now

Registration closes at 11:59 PM on Monday, October 26.

Columbia University
Pulitzer Hall
2950 Broadway
room 607B

Emily Feng is a White House correspondent for NPR. Prior to that she was an international correspondent, covering China, Taiwan and beyond. Her reporting has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, the Shorenstein Journalism Award, two Human Rights Press Awards, and two Gracie Awards.

Natasha Khan is a business reporter at The Wall Street Journal, covering American consumer giants, the forces driving the global consumer economy and trends reshaping the industry’s best-known brands. Prior to joining the Journal’s corporate bureau in New York, Natasha spent more than a decade as a foreign correspondent focusing primarily on China.

What drove a few thousand men and women from the deserts and cities of western China to the front lines of Syria’s war? In Our Hearts Burned for Home, journalist Emily Feng unearths the untold story of Uyghur exiles who fled China’s expanding police state—only to become a pivotal force behind the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“Our Hearts Burned for Home is an essential addition to the literature of the Middle East. It’s an important story meticulously told.” —Barbara Demick, author of Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

Learn more about Our Hearts Burned for Home