By Sally Shapiro

When UC Santa Barbara professor Mona Damluji finished her first children’s book, “Together,” she imagined a parent sitting down with their child, opening the book, and reading her words aloud— filling the room with unity and action.

“It’s something that enters someone’s home or a classroom, and it becomes part of a family's life,” Damluji said. “To me, there’s no greater honor.”

Damluji is an Emmy-nominated producer and teaches in UCBS’s Film and Media Studies department. She also co-convenes the Climate Justice Working Group, under the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Damluji published her first children’s book in 2021, a poem that stresses the importance of collective action. The book merges Damluji’s interests in social justice, activism, and storytelling. Together puts forward the idea that when we speak alone, we aren’t heard, but collective action has the power to change the world.

In Spring 2025, Damluji will release her second children’s book, “I Want You To Know.” Written for her children on the anniversary of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the book addresses the generational impacts of war and displacement, offering a parent’s perspective on current conflicts in the Middle East. It opens a dialogue about how childhoods can be shaped by colonialism and how trauma is passed down through generations. Damluji says her book aims to introduce families to important, yet complex, conversations through beautiful illustrations and the power of poetry. She recently spoke about it in an interview.

Q: Why the interest in children’s books specifically?

A: The immediate answer is that I had my first born in 2016 and my second was born in 2019, and I was constantly reading books for children. I’ve always loved children’s books and now my house is filled with them. I've turned to books to help facilitate challenging conversations with my own kids on many occasions. When you have a picture book that captures attention through a story, a character, or images that grab you and pull you in, it just makes anything possible.

UCSB professor Mona Damlui’s latest book cover features an illustration by Sweden-based Iraqi artist Ishtar Bäcklund Dakhil. The book is due to be published this spring.

The longer story is that my dear friend Innosanto Nagara wrote “A is for Activist” and started the whole social justice kids-lit movement. I was so excited to see him push the norms in terms of the language and ideas you can introduce in children’s books. Once I became a parent of young children, I wasn't able to show up to every protest I wanted to attend, and I didn't feel like I could do a lot of the things I had previously considered activism. So, I started thinking about what was at my disposal and my creative writing practice. Kids are incredibly insightful and willing to have honest conversations. We can all learn from their ability to be compassionate or from the clarity with which they think about life. They can just arrive at really simple, profound answers and I find that mind-blowing.

Q: What inspired your upcoming book, “I Want You to Know?”

A: My family is, in part, from Iraq.  While we are proud of our Iraqi lineage, there is a great deal of history that's very hard to talk about with young kids, and to explain why our family left Iraq and why we have not returned. Typically, I would turn to a picture book to help me initiate this kind of heavy, complicated conversation but I realized there was no book for this yet. I wasn't even thinking in terms of a picture book at first. It was more that I was questioning how I could explain these complexities to my kids in a way that makes sense. It was the 20th anniversary of the [2003 U.S.] invasion of Iraq and I sat down to write to my kids. I spilled out everything that I was trying to tell them. I wasn't even planning on sharing it with anyone, but once it was done, I decided to read the poem in a video on Instagram, because I felt an impulse to share it. Several people reached out to me to say it resonated with them, so I sent it to my editor at Seven Stories Press and they said, “If you ever want to think about making this into a book it could be very interesting. There's nothing like this.” That's when I read it to my eldest daughter, who is seven and my truest audience. I said, “Let's talk. What do you think?”

Q: What parts of your own history and ethnic identity informed the writing of this book?

A: My parents are both Iraqi and Lebanese and they both grew up in Baghdad. My parents had a beautiful adolescence. It’s like anywhere, you hear things about family, togetherness, funny stories, and in the background there was this context of darker political things that were really abstracted and distant from their everyday lives. They left in the 70s and came to the U. S. to finish medical school. They ended up in San Diego, which is where I grew up. My grandparents lived in Iraq until the first Gulf War [in 1990]. What I remember most vividly from that time was my grandparents writing us letters which would get redacted before they reached us. There was always a shroud of secrecy about Iraq, things I could not understand, as a child. 

UCSB Film and Media Studies professor Mona Damluji has worked as a producer and editor for outlets including PBS and the National Geographic Channel. More recently, she co-curated the traveling exhibit “Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture.” 

When I was 16, my parents decided to move our whole family to Beirut, Lebanon where I spent my last two years of high school. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It was so transformative because I was growing up in the context of the U. S. and San Diego, a very military-oriented society, and there were the wars in Iraq, and the civil war in Lebanon. Arabs and Muslims were constantly vilified as being terrorists or the enemies in whatever I was reading and watching. I really internalized a lot of that and I often didn't want people to know about my Arab heritage. I told my parents not to speak Arabic in public, I was carrying around a lot of shame and embarrassment around that part of my identity. Moving to Lebanon completely reversed that. Everything that I had grown up seeing in literature and movies and everything I absorbed through the news about what the Middle East supposedly was — violent, scary, dangerous — got completely undone the moment I moved there.

Q: What was the actual writing and publishing process like?

A: My style of creative writing is intuitive.  It begins when something is bubbling up inside of me and, by the time I sit down to write it, phrases that have been germinating in my head pour out onto the page. It's often spurred by a very strong emotion or idea. That was the case with “I Want You to Know” because I was feeling very stuck and very angry. Then it culminated in writing the poem.

The process of trying to find the illustrator for this book was difficult. I reached out to so many people and I just couldn't find the person with the right style and the right connection to the story. I almost gave up. But then I was referred to Ishtar [Bäcklund Dakhil], an artist based in Sweden, and I knew it was meant to be.  Creating the book was similar to the journey of trying to conceive a child. Sometimes it feels like it's not going to happen for you, and it can take so much longer than you ever anticipated. Then, if it happens, you meet your child and you realize this is why you waited so long and it was worth the wait. I do think of my books as my babies in that way.

Q: How do you think this book is relevant to today’s political landscape?

A: It's too relevant, unfortunately. We live in a world shaped by constant displacement and endless war. The book’s words don't say anything about a particular place, but Ishtar’s illustrations do depict specific paces in Iraq. The words, I hope, will resonate universally to anyone whose family has been touched by stories of loss and connection to a homeland. Whether it's your ancestors from three generations ago or whether it's happening to you at this moment, I imagine this book as an opening, or a beginning of a conversation with our children that will be ongoing.  Even if that's not your family history, it's so important to find a way to give this to families who've never had this conversation with their kids. I only imagine it as the beginning of a conversation that hopefully will be ongoing. I've read it with my kids and gotten their thoughts and they've been very involved along the way. The other day, after we told my daughter that Israel had extended its bombing from Gaza to Lebanon, where we have family, she asked “Mom, when is your book coming out? Because we really need that book.”


Sally Shapiro is a third-year Film and Media Studies major at UC Santa Barbara and writes for The Daily Nexus student newspaper. She wrote this piece for her Digital Journalism course.