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Atta Arghandiwal is an Afghan American author, speaker, humanitarian, and mentor. After leaving Afghanistan and living as a refugee in Germany, he arrived in the United States in December 1981 with basic English and $10. He began as a bank teller and built a 29-year career in banking. His books and talks explore memory, dignity, responsibility, and the practical work of starting again.

Atta Arghandiwal is an Afghan American author, speaker, humanitarian, and mentor whose work is rooted in a life rebuilt across countries, languages, and institutions.

Born in Kabul, Atta served in the Afghan Air Force and worked in public relations and sales at the Hotel Inter-Continental in Kabul. He left Afghanistan in August 1980 after the political rupture that followed the 1978 coup and the Soviet invasion. After living as a refugee in Germany, he arrived in the United States in December 1981 with basic English and $10.

Atta began his American working life as a bank teller. Over the next 29 years, he built a career in banking and rose to Senior Vice President and Regional Manager. That experience—beginning again, learning unfamiliar systems, earning trust, supporting a family, and accepting responsibility—became part of the foundation for his writing and community work.

His books include Lost Decency: The Gilded Cages and the Search for Home and The Self-Sufficient Immigrant in the Age of AI: A Field Manual for the Work of Standing Again, co-authored with Sohrab Rasouli. Across memoir, public conversation, and practical guidance, Atta examines Afghanistan, exile, moral memory, work, family stability, self-sufficiency, and the dignity of rebuilding a life.

Today, Atta writes and speaks for readers, universities, libraries, cultural institutions, immigrant-serving organizations, and communities seeking a serious conversation about memory, responsibility, and human judgment in a changing world.

Sohrab Rasouli is an Afghan immigrant, AI product builder, founder of Noura, co-author of The Self-Sufficient Immigrant in the Age of AI, and lead of the AI Self-Sufficiency Lab. His work connects three things: his own experience of rebuilding, direct work inside employment services, and hands-on development of practical AI systems. After rebuilding through education and work, he supported refugees and newcomers directly through employment services. That experience showed him that capable people are often blocked not by a lack of ability, but by systems that cannot yet recognize their experience, evidence, or potential. He founded Noura to help workforce organizations and their frontline teams prepare, organize, and verify their work while keeping people in control.

Sohrab Rasouli is an Afghan immigrant, AI product builder, founder of Noura, co-author of The Self-Sufficient Immigrant in the Age of AI: A Field Manual for the Work of Standing Again, and lead of the AI Self-Sufficiency Lab. His work connects his own experience of rebuilding, direct work inside employment services, and hands-on development of practical AI systems.

His life has required more than one serious restart across countries, shaping his attention to what happens when a capable person enters a system that cannot yet recognize the whole person. In Afghanistan, he rebuilt through education, teaching, university work, and creating an academy. When he later had to begin again in the United States, he rebuilt through ordinary work before moving into direct employment support for refugees and newcomers.

That employment work made one problem impossible to ignore: people are often not short of ability; they are blocked by systems that cannot yet read their experience, evidence, or potential. Sohrab came to AI through this problem, not through hype. He began studying and building with the technology to see whether it could make complicated work more understandable and manageable without taking judgment away from the person or professional responsible for the decision.

He founded Noura to carry that principle into practical workforce systems. Noura is a supervised AI system being built for workforce organizations and their frontline teams. Its earliest lessons came from employment support, but its purpose is broader: helping workforce teams prepare, organize, research, draft, verify, and follow through on complex work while preserving evidence, professional judgment, and human responsibility. Sohrab also leads the AI Self-Sufficiency Lab, where participants learn to protect private information, give AI clear instructions, verify what it produces, and create useful work they understand and can take responsibility for.