Refugee Solomon Tesfaye *20 Finds New Footing, and a Novel, in the U.S.

When Solomon Tesfaye *20, a refugee from Yemen, arrived in the U.S. as a teenager, he didn’t know where his life would take him. What he did realize, as he grew and entered adulthood, was that he wanted to do work that would inspire others, whether that was through nonprofits and NGOs, or being named a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow for a novel in progress about the refugee experience.

“I’m the only one in my community to get this far,” he says. “What should I do with this to give back in whatever way I can?”

Tesfaye was born and raised in a refugee camp in Yemen, to parents who had fled Ethiopia. The family moved to Buffalo, New York, with the help of the U.N. Refugee Agency when he was 13 years old.

It was more than a bit of a culture — and climate — shock. His first fall in Buffalo was in 2006, when a rare October lake-effect storm dumped nearly 2 feet of snow on the city. “I got stuck in a bodega,” he says.

His parents opened a restaurant, Abyssinia Ethiopian Cuisine, which is now located in the food court at the Downtown Buffalo Bazaar, as a way to support the family.

The restaurant became a valued meeting place and community spot for fellow refugees, which stuck in Tesfaye’s mind as he graduated high school and then earned a bachelor’s in behavioral neuroscience at Colgate University. By then, Princeton was on his radar because of potential neuroscience internships. “Princeton and the likes of the Ivy League was unimaginable for a refugee because I didn’t know of any refugees or anybody in my community that went to an Ivy League school or even applied to an Ivy League school,” he says.

But instead of pursuing that path after graduating, he moved to Boston to work for a consulting firm, which is where the idea of getting an advanced degree in public policy took hold.

So had the idea of writing. While working on his master’s in public affairs at Princeton, he was also thinking about sharing his story, so that fellow refugees would see themselves and others could learn more about what it’s like to be one.

After Princeton, he took six months off to work on what has become the novel In-Between Worlds. While he continued to sharpen the book he also worked for nonprofit organizations and consulting groups to support the World Bank USA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among others. Tesfaye doesn’t see his work in public policy and his work as a fiction writer as separate ambitions, or as having different goals.

This summer, he was selected as a 2025 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, which is for early-career writers from communities that are typically underrepresented in publishing. His novel is a dual-timeline story about Hana, a Christian Ethiopian girl raised in a Yemen refugee camp who becomes a successful attorney in the U.S. When an asylum seeker dredges up secrets about Hana, she must confront her past and reckon with what freedom, home, and justice really mean.

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Through the fellowship, Tesfaye will receive five months of one-on-one mentorship in both writing and the practicalities of how the publishing industry works, including how to market and create a platform. It will also provide introductions to editors, agents, and publishers.

“This book feels like a calling from my faith,” he says, adding that he also believes it’s important to put refugee experiences, even fictionalized ones, into written form. While the oral tradition of storytelling is powerful in his community, it often keeps stories contained within circles that already know them. Writing his story ensures it travels farther, reaches people who need to hear it, and takes its rightful place alongside the narratives that shape history and culture.

“For people like me who are both African American and Arab, we contain multiple identities that I think showcase that our existence as a refugee is not a monolith. We’re a stew of so many different things,” he says, which he hopes will show through in this novel.