Sayema Khatun is the principal of Akkhor Bangla School, a heritage language community school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, established in 2015. She is one of the coordinators of the Friends of Bangla Schools (FOBS), an alliance of 16 Bangla schools that organizes an annual milan mela, an assembly of Bangla schools across the country. Sayema has just completed the 2024 Heritage Language Teacher Workshop from the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) at UCLA, and she is developing a Bangla heritage language curriculum for the community school program, in collaboration with the NHLRC. She is also a member of the South Asian Language Teachers Association (SALTA) and recently presented a paper on "Potential of Literature to Teach Bengali as a Heritage Language" at the SALTA Conference 2024, UW-Madison. A first-generation immigrant and Bangladeshi-American socio-cultural anthropologist, Sayema earned an MS in anthropology (focusing on Rohingya refugees) at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is a former associate professor at the Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, and she has worked on South Asian history, society, and culture for the last 20 years. Currently, she is an independent consultant for ACTFL as a Bengali language expert. Her research interests and ethnographic writings revolve around a wide range of topics in Bengal and Bangladesh studies, such as Bangla language, literature and culture, indigeneity, collective identity, citizenship, and making of refugees, policy and humanitarian intervention, partition of British-India, and recurring conflicts/crisis in Bangladesh-India-Myanmar borders. Besides publishing bilingual academic papers, she also writes short stories, poems, and op-eds in print and online publishing outlets and has published two books. Currently, she is preparing to pursue a PhD in the 2025-2026 year. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband and teenage daughter. Her areas of expertise are the following: Bengali language, literature, and culture; Bangladesh studies; ethnography; South Asian society and culture; gender-based violence; Rohingya refugees; ethnic conflict; indigeneity; and transborder issues. Email: sayema.khatun@akkhor.org