At Yale Law School, Kaur served as a legal observer at a prisoner’s hearing at Guantánamo, where the U.S.

As a Stanford undergraduate, Kaur learned that a Sikh family friend had become “the first person killed in a hate crime after 9/11,” and the tragedy led her to travel across the country to interview other victims, whose stories she told in the documentary Divided We Fall. She has perhaps taken those words too much to heart in her first book, an overambitious blend of memoir, self-help, and left-leaning polemic. See No Stranger helps us imagine new ways of being with each other - and with ourselves - so that together we can begin to build the world we want to see.A Los Angeles–based Sikh American activist, lawyer, and filmmaker tries to reinvent the wheel of love in her coming-of-age memoir.Īs the child of Sikh farmers in Clovis, California, Kaur grew up with the Punjabi phrase “chardi kala,” often translated as “relentless optimism,” a state prized by her faith. Drawing from the wisdom of sages, scientists, and activists, Kaur reclaims love as an active, public, and revolutionary force that creates new possibilities for ourselves, our communities, and our world.

Kaur takes listeners through her own riveting journey - as a brown girl growing up in California farmland finding her place in the world as a young adult galvanized by the murders of Sikhs after 9/11 as a law student fighting injustices in American prisons and on Guantánamo Bay as an activist working with communities recovering from xenophobic attacks and as a woman trying to heal from her own experiences with police violence and sexual assault. Starting from that place of wonder, the world begins to change: It is a practice that can transform a relationship, a community, a culture, even a nation. It enjoins us to see no stranger but instead look at others and say: You are part of me I do not yet know. How do we love in a time of rage? How do we fix a broken world while not breaking ourselves? Valarie Kaur - renowned Sikh activist, filmmaker, and civil rights lawyer - describes revolutionary love as the call of our time, a radical, joyful practice that extends in three directions: to others, to our opponents, and to ourselves. 'In a world stricken with fear and turmoil, Valarie Kaur shows us how to summon our deepest wisdom.' (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love )

An urgent manifesto and a dramatic memoir of awakening, this is the story of revolutionary love.įinalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

See no stranger kaur