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On July 20, Omar El Akkad’s second novel
What Strange Paradise will debut. But El Akkad’s creative writing career began on a different day: September 11, 2001, in Professor Carolyn Smart’s creative writing class.
“Our first class was Tuesday September 11, 2001. It was a few hours after the planes crashed into the towers. It was the first creative writing class I ever did, the first time I met Carolyn Smart. That was a day where there were a lot of terrified kids in that class and Carolyn did a herculean job of calming us all down,” El Akkad, CompSci ’04, told