Grace Maral Burnett--My first bilingual experience was English and Azerbaijani Turkish.

I met Grace...ahem...Maral the first summer after I moved to DC. We realized we had a unique connection. Like my father, her mom immigrated here from Iran. And her dad’s family, well part of them have roots back in Kentucky, just like my mom’s family. 

We’ve stayed in touch over the years, playing on the same Saturday morning soccer team, and keeping in contact even when she moved to Istanbul. Now that she’s back in the DC area, and leaning on that friendship, I reached out to Maral earlier this spring to gauge her interest in jumping on the podcast. 

One of the main reasons I wanted Maral to join this project was because she’s Azerbaijani. And all the others are Persian. I wanted to jump into how that affected her growing up. Because I knew there were some very real tensions that existed between Persians and Azerbaijanis.