Written by Michael Blanding | Illustration by Cannady Chapman | Published on Oct. 3, 2025
The Human Space In Between
Through warmth and heartbreak, Pede Hollist’s writing immerses readers in the immigrant experience
In the title story of Pede Hollist’s upcoming short story collection BackHomeAbroad, a panicked young man calls the United States from West Africa. He details a litany of crises — rebels have invaded his village and are terrorizing the residents; an aunt and her four hungry children have moved into his house; and he needs money. The woman on the other end sighs, annoyed at having been woken at 5:30 a.m. “It’s early morning,” she says. “Call back tomorrow.”
The moment captures an ambivalence that flows like a stream through nearly all the stories in Hollist’s collection, which is at times smart, whimsical and heartbreaking. Later in the same story, the woman in the States flies into a rage after she discovers her husband has sent money set aside for their mortgage to help relatives in Africa. “I tried to capture the in-between space that exists for first-generation immigrants who come here to settle,” Hollist said. “Everything that happens here is affected by what happens there. Home is oftentimes like a suction cup on our bodies.”
Hollist knows that in-between world well. As a first-generation immigrant from Sierra Leone who became a professor of English and writing at UTampa, he has drawn upon his own experiences for his writing, starting with his debut 2012 novel So the Path Does Not Die. The book addresses the subject of female circumcision through the story of Fina, a woman from a village in Sierra Leone who emigrates to the United States through a series of misadventures before heeding the pull of home, where she finds personal peace in supporting abused and ostracized women and girls.
The novel received new recognition last year when it was chosen as an official selection for a half-million students studying for the West African Senior School Certificate Examination — the West African equivalent of the SAT. As someone who grew up with African writers such as Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the story’s selection is a humbling experience for Hollist. “I admired these writers — they opened up new worlds for us,” he said. “Contemplating that I might approach something like that in the minds of younger Africans is overwhelming, especially considering that I made the turn towards becoming a writer later in life.”
Now 68, Arthur Onipede Hollist was born in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown. He spent his formative early years in London, where his father was a diplomat. “At heart, I am really a British boy,” he said. His family owned a set of English classic literature, and he was thrilled by the worlds introduced to him by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, as much as the swashbuckling tales like H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, which presented a colonialist view of Africa. “The criticism is absolutely true when you read it with today’s lens,” he said, “but as a young boy, I was just in it for the adventure.”
His love of classic literature influences his own style today. “I tell my beginning creative writing students, ‘Stop all the experimentation — just tell a story about people. Make the characters interesting, let them discover something they didn’t know, and react to it.’”
Hollist returned from England to study literature at the University of Sierra Leone, before earning his master’s at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia with a dissertation on Jane Austen. Returning to Sierra Leone, he struggled to find a teaching position before an American literature professor who had studied on a Fulbright in Sierra Leone invited him to the University of South Florida as a teaching assistant, offering him a research stipend for the summer. “I was able to survive because of the small ways ordinary Americans helped me,” said Hollist, who arrived at UTampa in 1986.
A NOVEL TAKES SHAPE IN THE NIGHT
After two decades of teaching, Hollist said, he read a book about the importance of having passive income, and he decided he would write a novel. “I read a lot of books, and sometimes you think, I could do better than that,” he said. At the time, talk show host Oprah Winfrey was minting instant bestselling authors when she tapped them for her book club. “I figured, I’d send it to Oprah, and I’d be set,” Hollist said, laughing now at his own naivete.
Hollist wrote the book through an unusual process. His mother, who was living with him at the time, was bedridden, and he had to wake up at 1 a.m. to turn her over to avoid bedsores. “The exertion would leave me wide awake,” said Hollist, who would then write until 6 a.m. as the novel took shape. Inspired by Amy Tan, whose Joy Luck Club brought alive the Asian immigrant experience, he hoped to do something similar for Africans. “I wanted to bring alive the stories of me and my contemporaries who came of age in the United States,” he said, “to tell the African story in the way that other immigrant stories have been told.”
Over the years teaching, he’d often been called into gender studies classes to talk about the controversial issue of female circumcision — still practiced in some rural areas of Africa — which pits local traditions around coming of age against modern criticisms of the practice as genital mutilation. Hollist decided to dramatize the issue as an important conflict of his book, as its protagonist Fina deals with the fallout from a ritual circumcision in her childhood that excludes her family from the larger community. At the same time, the novel weaves interlocking narratives of characters representing the African diaspora on both continents, from diamond traders to aid workers, and doctors to criminals.
“Many of the experiences and issues that come up in the novel have either happened to me, someone I know, or I learned about them in the news or social media,” he said. To write from a woman’s perspective, he relied on stories told to him by female friends, as well as decades of literary analysis, often from critical perspectives around gender, which “subconsciously seeped into the character.”
The novel was first published in Cameroon. Though Oprah didn’t immediately come calling, it was well-received as a feminist novel that was provocative without being preachy. “Temperamentally as well as intellectually, that’s what I strive to do with any topic,” Hollist said, “trying to present it from multiple perspectives.”
Around the same time the novel appeared, Hollist also received acclaim for a short story, “Foreign Aid,” that was shortlisted for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing, which honors the best short story published by an African writer each year. That story follows a successful African man who returns home to Sierra Leone after 20 years in America, thinking he will support and modernize his family, only to be confronted with harsh realities, symbolized by the theft of his suitcases upon arrival.
Coinciding with the selection of So the Path Does Not Die for the West African exam, the book has been republished this year in a beautiful new edition by Nigeria-based publisher Narrative Landscape Press. “We fell in love with this book,” said press founder Eghosa Imasuen. “It examines female sexual circumcision without being overly pandering and is full of all these crazy characters in an American city, written in a way that’s both playful and poignant.” It is also the perfect exam book to teach young readers, he added. “On a surface level, you can easily show the kids, this is foreshadowing, this is a red herring,” Imasuen said. “Most of the tools of fiction, including setting, character, conflict and dialogue are used in powerful ways.”
For his part, Hollist hopes So the Path Does Not Die will resonate with African students in a way that will immerse them in the work. “Circumcision is an issue that is not spoken about publicly very much, but people understand it’s there,” he said. “The stories that they hear around them have been captured and put together in the novel, so there would be a degree of relevance for them that is not present in some of the non-African selections.”
INSPIRATION FOUND CLOSE TO HOME
Narrative Landscape is also publishing Hollist’s collection of short stories, which is set to appear in October. The stories are a masterclass in storytelling in a range of moods, including the opener, “Underlying Condition,” which subverts readers’ expectations in describing an aborted hug between a professor and a student during the COVID-19 pandemic in deliberately melodramatic language. Another standout is “Wherever Something Stands, Something Else Will Stand Beside It,” an ambitious story about two warring African tribes and an intersex child who represents hope for reconciliation.
The story, which won the 2023 Best Short Story from the African Literature Association, grew out of two experiences, both involving UTampa students. One involved a study abroad trip to Ghana, in which students visited a school that was segregated by tribal divisions and attempted to run team-building exercises to bridge the gap. Another experience that profoundly affected Hollist involved a transgender student who was a star pupil until their parents discovered their gender change, causing their grades to slip.
“As professors, I don’t know if we acknowledge enough what students give us,” Hollist said. “You get exposed to ideas that your own personal experience base would not have allowed. Those little flickers of insight will be my takeaway when I finally walk away from teaching, showing that they gave me a lot more than I gave them.” Hollist frequently jots down notes during the teaching day, collecting quotations and ideas that might form the germ of a future story.
In his exploration of the immigrant experience, Hollist hopes that the humanity in his stories will help deepen the empathy of his readers. “When I listen to the immigrant conversation these days, I think it misses the human part of it, where people are helping other people,” he said.
“The place I am in today is the result of generosity and grace from individuals who offered me a helping hand. I
try and be optimistic and recognize that what we are seeing on the news and social media doesn’t capture the full reality of what’s happening — that there are Americans of all hues who are helping those being detained, and the grace is still there.”
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