Stephanie Saldaña grew up in Texas and received a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College and a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. In 2004 she went to Damascus to study Islam on a Fulbright scholarship. At the remote Mar Musa monastery in the Syrian desert she found a new relationship with God as well as her future husband, Frédéric, a French novice monk. They now live in Jerusalem with their two children. Saldaña teaches at the Honors College for Liberal Arts and Sciences, a partnership of Bard College and Al-Quds University. She has written three books, What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refugees and the Things They Carry, The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faithand A Country Between: Making a Home Where Both Sides of Jerusalem Collide, and is the founder of Mosaic Stories, a project to preserve the threatened cultural heritage of the Middle East through research and storytelling.