A Conversation with Ahmed Badr
2026 MENA Heritage Month Keynote
Event Details
The Middle Eastern North African Heritage Month Planning Collective proudly presents the 2026 keynote, A Conversation with Ahmed Badr. Ahmed is an Iraqi-American author, professor, and social entrepreneur working at the intersection of creativity, displacement, and youth empowerment. As a teen, Ahmed founded Narratio, an organization that supports the creative expression of displaced young people through fellowships, workshops, publishing, and partnerships. Currently, he is an assistant professor of Practice in Public Policy and directs the Patricelli Center for Entrepreneurship at Wesleyan University. His work includes the book While the Earth Sleeps We Travel: Stories, Poetry, and Art from Young Refugees Around the World and the art installation Unpacked: Refugee Baggage, among many other projects that explore how storytelling and creativity can drive social change. This event is free and open to the public.
Doors open at 6:30 pm.
We value inclusion and access for all participants and are pleased to provide reasonable accommodations for this event. Please call 608-265-2513 or email msc@studentaffairs.wisc.edu to make a disability-related accommodation request. Requests should be made by Tuesday, March 10, 2026, though reasonable effort will be made to support late accommodation requests.