Lisa Guill: The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees, and Why Lincoln Welcomes

Episode Summary

In the spring of 2023, Lisa Guill stood up at a press conference to give Lincoln an update on its new welcoming and belonging plan. In the audience, invited along by a friend, was a senior acquisitions editor from the University of Nebraska Press. He left with an idea: Lincoln should publish a book of first-person essays by the immigrants and refugees who live here.

Three years later, that book exists. The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees: Tales of Migration, Hope, Grief, and Finding Home in Nebraska collects thirty-one essays, edited by a team of five, with a foreword by Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird. Lisa joined Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore in the roasting room the morning after four of those authors read their work aloud at a bookshop downtown.

About Lisa Guill

Lisa Guill is Director of Communications and Development at the Asian Community & Cultural Center in Lincoln. She previously served as Welcoming Communities Coordinator for the Cultural Centers of Lincoln, a position funded by city and county partners, and in that role led the effort that earned Lincoln a Four Star Certified Welcoming designation from Welcoming America. She holds a degree in Spanish and French translation and interpretation from the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and is one of five editors of The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees.

About the Conversation

Asking someone to write down the worst thing that has happened to them is, as Lisa puts it, an impossibly high ask. The first general call for essays produced nothing. What worked instead was slower and more personal: monthly workshops at the Asian Center, coworkers willing to go first, and a great deal of asking friends directly and then asking again. Five of the authors are elders who neither speak English nor write in their first language, so their stories had to be captured by interview — a method worked out with a retired journalism professor on the editing team. Each author was paired with an editor, and each kept final say over how their story appeared.

From there the conversation opens outward. Lincoln is home to more than thirty thousand immigrants and refugees, roughly a tenth of the city, and Marilyn describes watching that arrive from inside Lincoln Public Schools: conflict somewhere in the world, then eighteen months, then those families in Lincoln classrooms. Lisa describes the infrastructure that grew up to meet them — two long-standing resettlement agencies working inside a ninety- to one-hundred-eighty-day funding window, a New Americans Task Force running since the 1990s, and employers like TMCO and Kawasaki bringing English instruction onto the worksite.

When reviewers from Welcoming America came to Lincoln for their on-site visit, they kept asking Lisa the same question: how does this hold together here, when it has fallen apart elsewhere. Her answer was the same every time. The people.

The Mug

Lisa brought a mug printed with mahjong tiles. When the Asian Center decided in early 2025 to start a mahjong club and a fundraiser around the game, someone had to learn it well enough to teach it, and that turned out to be her. She has been pulling family and friends into it ever since. Marilyn, who considers herself good at games and puzzles, confessed to being utterly baffled by mahjong — and got a teacher's answer: be patient with yourself.