Local Ethiopian immigrant Zinet Kemal found she had some extra time on her hands. Since moving to Minnesota nine years ago, she had earned degrees from St. Paul College and Metropolitan State University, taken a job as an IT auditor for Hennepin County, and started an online graduate program in cybersecurity at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In between she was managing her four children, and adapting to life in frozen Minnesota. Nonetheless, when her kids came back from school and told her some of their fellow students speculated that they wore hijabs because they were bald or their hair was dirty, Kemal decided it was time to write a book that straightened things out.

Her illustrated book, Proud in Her Hijab, was published in August 2021, and is now available from Amazon and other vendors. You can read more about Kemal’s journey and her life here in this story — recently published in the excellent local online news resource, Sahan Journal.