In Salt in the Snow, Sahra Noor traces her journey from a childhood shaped by family and tradition in Mogadishu, Somalia to a life forged across borders in the United States and beyond. Blending migration, motherhood, grief, and questions of belonging, the memoir examines what is carried forward and what must be reimagined when living between cultures. 

Book Description: From the sunlit courtyard of her family home in Mogadishu to the icy streets of Minneapolis, Salt in the Snow is a deeply personal memoir about migration, motherhood, and the enduring influence of a father’s love.

Raised in a close-knit, multigenerational Somali household, Sahra was shaped early by tradition and by the towering presence of her father, Noor. His voice, his choices, and his values became the compass by which she learned to navigate the world. But when she arrived in the United States as a teenager, everything shifted. As she built a life in America on her own terms, she examined how her father’s hopes and expectations both shaped and confined her and how the love between them, though complex, endured through every chapter of her life. 

Told with fierce honesty, emotional clarity, and quiet resilience, Salt in the Snow is a memoir for anyone who has ever straddled two cultures, two generations, or two selves and searched for belonging in the in-between.

Buy the book here. Author Bio:

Sahra Noor is a writer, international health and philanthropy consultant, executive coach, and leadership development expert based in Nairobi, Kenya. Noor is the Founder and CEO of Grit Partners, a consulting firm that supports health system reform, capacity building, and leadership transformation across Africa and beyond.

You mention that listening to your father’s interview voice notes after his passing motivated you to tell your own story. Can you share a little more about how your father’s legacy inspired you to share your own? 

What I meant is that my father was our historian and one of the greatest storytellers I knew. I learned how to survive by watching him live. When he died at the height of COVID-19, while our city was still reeling from the murder of George Floyd, I felt compelled to turn to his voice and then look inward. He inspired me to examine, a little more deeply, what survival had cost us, what it had given us, and choose what parts of his story and mine I would want to pass on to my children, and to theirs.

What was the process like in writing your memoir? 

Writing a book is a painstaking process. Every chapter, every revision, every detail takes time, often far more than I expected. Then come the reviewers and editors, each with strong opinions about what to add, cut, or how to reshape it. I am not a patient person, and staying with the process has been frustrating at times, but what I lack in patience, I make up for in persistence, and I’m grateful the finish line is finally in sight. 🙂

Were you surprised by anything in the writing process? I’ve always loved a challenge, but I wasn’t prepared for how deeply my own writing would affect me. During the writing process, I took breaks often, especially when I was writing scenes or dialogue that carried conflict or tension. Those pauses didn’t bother me, though. It gave me the distance and perspective I needed to return and write with respect and care for the people and situations I was writing about.

As someone trained in nursing rather than writing, did you face any challenges transitioning into the role of an author? What helped you gain confidence in your voice? I’m an avid reader, and I’ve written and published reports, journal articles, and even a book chapter on philanthropy. I thought that experience prepared me to write a memoir, and I knew the terrain. And I quickly learned that narrative writing is very different, and I had A LOT to learn.

Writing workshops, coaches, and reviewer feedback, especially in the early stages of the manuscript, gave me a bit of confidence that I was on the right track. When I doubted myself, I reached out to my friend, Ahmed Yusuf, who is an author, and his kind but honest feedback was helpful. The hardest part was learning how to build a world, how to help a reader see, hear, and feel what I had lived. That learning curve was very humbling. But once it clicked, every scene and sensory detail I provided turned into a bridge back to my old self.

You experienced many traumatic events in your childhood, both directly and through the stories you overheard from your family. How has this trauma affected you in the present? Did writing the memoir offer any sense of healing or understanding? I had done the healing work years earlier through therapy and conversations with family and friends, but the writing has helped me process the grief of losing my father for sure, and it brought understanding and a sense of closure around experiences I had never shared out loud before.

You describe landing at JFK Airport as feeling like stepping onto a different planet. How long did it take for you to adjust to life in America, and did it ever truly start to feel like home? This is a hard question because the answer isn’t straightforward. In many ways, adjusting to life in America came more easily for me because I was young. I learned English and immersed myself in school and work fairly quickly. When we moved to Minneapolis and closer to my extended family, I did feel a sense of home.

You mention that during your arrival in America, and later, during your nursing studies, you felt your Blackness become a wall between you and the rest of society. Was this sense of separation something you experienced only in the United States, and did it change once you returned to Nairobi? In your view, what solutions might address this lingering feeling of otherness that persists in America despite its claims to equality? When I say Blackness became a wall, I mean that race, as a label, was something I encountered for the first time in America. I grew up in a Black community, in an African country, where Blackness as a social construct didn’t exist. I also didn’t grow up learning about the transatlantic slave trade or what that history had come to mean for people who looked like me in the United States. It seemed to me Blackness had a script everyone else knew except me, and it took me a long time to learn how to read and navigate through it. Returning to Nairobi reminded me that the “wall” is a uniquely American experience, not something inherent to me or something I have to deal with in an African context.

As for solutions, I’m wary of easy answers, especially seeing how things are unfolding in the US at the moment. The feeling of otherness in America persists because equality is often framed as access without belonging. You can be “included” and still feel isolated, unseen, and marginalized. Addressing it requires a deeper reckoning with history, geopolitics, and a broader definition of who is “American”. 

Your career eventually led you into healthcare reform, where you worked to change systems from within. What moments in your early life or early nursing experiences most clearly revealed the need for reform? I grew up in an intergenerational home that taught me the power of interdependence long before I had a word for it. Everyone leaned on each other, and when someone was sick, we all cared for them. When someone struggled, we all stepped in. That upbringing shaped how I see the world and why I care about health reform.

I see health as a community issue and shared responsibility. And through education, I learned it is also a system issue, so as a health professional, I see it as my moral and ethical obligation to “fix” what is broken, domestically or globally. 

Towards the end of the memoir, you wrote, “Sometimes it feels like we’re not rooted anywhere, like we’re made up of all the places we’ve been.” How does this idea shape the understanding of identity and belonging in the book? It shaped my understanding because I believe that if we are made up of the many places we’ve been and lived, we never lose our sense of “home”. We become capable of building one anywhere. We can adapt quickly. 

What do you hope readers understand about the refugee experience that is often overlooked or misunderstood? I hope readers understand that refugees are not just headlines or statistics. We are people with full lives, complicated families, and deep hopes just like everyone else. The refugee experience is often reduced to trauma or survival, but it also includes resilience, love, and humor. Most importantly, I want readers to see that being a refugee does not erase your identity or your humanity. War and displacement change the trajectory of your life, but do not define your worth or your destiny.

What do you hope is the main takeaway for readers of Salt in the Snow?