The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan & Coming of Age in America
Thursday, October 1, 2026 | 4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Rackham Amphitheatre
915 Washington Street, Fourth Floor
Free and open to the public.
RSVP here. RSVPs are not required, but are helpful for planning and updates.
Inside the extraordinary effort to evacuate hundreds of Afghans from Kabul and the journey of four Afghan women rebuilding their lives in the U.S.
In 2021, as Rebecca Blumenstein was driving her son to college, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Then a top editor at The New York Times, Blumenstein was deeply involved in the organization’s effort to evacuate more than 200 Afghan colleagues and family members who feared reprisal for their work. After a harrowing journey through three countries, a group of 124 employees of the Times’ Kabul bureau and their families landed in Houston, becoming the largest privately sponsored group of refugees in modern American history. This is the story of four of the women who were part of that group. Before Kabul fell, they were the vanguard of a new Afghanistan, on the verge of becoming doctors and lawyers. Blumenstein then oversaw their resettlement, and along with colleagues, pushed for them to resume their education and careers, lives now impossible for the women in Afghanistan.
Join co-authors Rebecca Blumenstein, now President, Editorial of NBC News, and Diana Kapp, both graduates of the University of Michigan, for a conversation with Mursal Rahim, one of the young women profiled in “The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America.” They will be interviewed by journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen about these extraordinary efforts and the making of their book.
Together, they will explore the dramatic story behind the evacuation and the experiences of the four Afghan women – Mursal, Marwa, Maryam and Samira – as they forge new futures in America.
“The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America” will be available for purchase from BookSweet at the event. All proceeds benefit Journalism Refugees Education Fund.
About Speakers
Rebecca Blumenstein is the President, Editorial of NBC News. Previously, she was the deputy managing editor of The New York Times, and later the deputy editor for the Publisher’s Office, working closely with New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger to support the paper’s rapidly growing journalism operations. Before that, she spent 22 years at The Wall Street Journal, rising to deputy editor-in-chief. Blumenstein is a graduate of the University of Michigan, former editor-in-chief of the Michigan Daily and a member of the Wallace House Executive Advisory Board. In 2024, she received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Michigan and was the university’s Winter Commencement speaker.
Diana Kapp is a journalist who frequently writes about the intersection of women and modern culture and has traveled to Afghanistan to report on girls’ education in the country’s rural northern provinces. Her long-form pieces have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, 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.” Kapp is a graduate of the University of Michigan.
Mursal Rahim is a Cornell MPA graduate with a concentration in Human Rights and Social Justice and a bachelor’s degree in law from Afghanistan. She works in Immigration and Refugee Services. Her work focuses on human rights, refugee protection, and advocacy for Afghan women and girls.
About the Moderator
Anna Quindlen is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. She is the author of nine novels: “Object Lessons,” “One True Thing,” “Black and Blue,” “Blessings,” “Rise and Shine,” “Every Last One,” “Still Life with Bread Crumbs,” “Miller’s Valley,” and “Alternate Side.” Her memoir “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake,” published in 2012, was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Her book “A Short Guide to a Happy Life” has sold more than a million copies. Her most recent books are “Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting” and “Write For Your Life.” While a columnist at The New York Times, she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, “Living Out Loud” and “Thinking Out Loud.” Her Newsweek columns were collected in “Loud and Clear.” Quindlen is the recipient of our Richard M. Clurman Award for mentoring and served as a Livingston Awards judge for Wallace House from 2009 to 2021.