In this episode of "Keen On", Andrew is joined by Ty McCormick, the author of "Beyond the Sand and Sea", to share the story of one family of Somali refugees' 30 year odyssey to reach the United States. From escaping an impoverished life in Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp, to winning a scholarship to study literature at Princeton, protagonist Asad Hussein embodies the strength of a family of Somali refugees who never lost faith in America.
Ty McCormick is an editor at Foreign Affairs. A former foreign correspondent in Nairobi and before that in Cairo, he has reported from more than a dozen countries in Africa and the Middle East, including Egypt, Lebanon, Somalia, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New Republic, and National Geographic, among others. From 2015 to 2018, he served as Africa editor of Foreign Policy magazine, where he led a team of journalists that won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for a Pulitzer Center-supported series on African migration. He was the bronze medal recipient of the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize from the U.N. Correspondents Association in 2016 and was short-listed for international journalist of the year at the 2017 One World Media Awards in Britain. His first book, Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Family's Quest for a Country to Call Home, is out now!
Ty McCormick on One Family's Quest for a Country to Call Home