On Topic: Last Free Women with Diana Kapp

Don’t miss this edition of City of Asylum’s On Topic series where Diana Kapp discusses her upcoming book, which publishes on September 8, 2026. Diana will be joined in conversation by Samira Rustami and Marwa Rahim, two of the women featured in the work.

The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America is an intimate portrait of the journey of four women as they seek to make the most of their precious freedom in America. They start over, while back home, the Taliban bans girls’ education and prevents women from leaving their homes alone.

Efforts to evacuate the group were taking place as co-author Rebecca Blumenstein was driving her son cross-country to college. As a top editor of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, she had been deeply involved in managing the foreign correspondents the paper sent to war zones. As the lives of their Afghan Bureau employees and their families were imperiled by the Taliban’s swift resurgence, she played a pivotal role in coordinating their evacuation, ultimately securing the relocation of more than 200 people from Afghanistan, 124 to the US—the largest privately sponsored group of refugees in modern American history. She then led their resettlement into their new life in the U.S.

Though each navigates different circumstances and dreams, these four brave, remarkable women—Marwa, Mursal, Maryam, and Samira—are united in their desire to make the most of the opportunity they have been given. Stories of hope and resilience, setback and struggle, ambition and joy, The Last Free Women grapples with what America owes those who seek freedom on our shores, and how they, like generations of immigrants before them, will remake what it is to be American.

You can purchase a copy of The Last Free Women at the City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author

Diana Kapp is a journalist who writes frequently about the intersection of women and modern culture, and has traveled in Afghanistan to report on the education of girls in the country’s rural northern provinces. Her longform pieces have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Elle, More, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Marie Claire, among other publications. She is the author of two YA books profiling female changemakers: Girls Who Run the World and Girls Who Green the World.

In Conversation with

Samira Rustami is completing her RN degree at Shady Side School of Nursing, and her BA at Chatham University. She holds a BA in Business from Gujarat University in India.

Marwa Rahim was a 3rd year medical student in August 2021 when she had to flee Kabul. She is a senior at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, majoring in Human Biology and Neuroscience. She hopes to return to medical school after graduation.