Coming from western Sydney, Rania Omar dreaded the inevitable questions from her classmates at Burwood Girls High School.

“I would always get questions from other young people asking me, ‘Oh, are there always gunshots?’ and ‘Aren’t you scared’,” says 25-year-old Omar, a Muslim woman from a Lebanese background.

“I hated it, and I was embarrassed living in western Sydney. And then I grew to resent western Sydney because of all the ways we were represented in the media. As any young person does, navigating the world and growing up, you’re like, ‘This identity doesn’t look very good, and I don’t want it any more’.”

It was only as she matured that Omar, now a poet, writer and visual artist, began to realise that deep down her love of her faith and identity was unshakeable.

“I went to university and when I reflected on what made me feel safe and comfortable, it was my community,” she says. “It was walking down the streets of Greenacre, getting all the love and all the smiles. If I’m struggling with something, someone immediately comes to help me. There is so much community and companionship within Western Sydney, but I wasn’t seeing it because I was too busy hating it.”

As a youngster, writing and books were Omar’s refuge.

“I was so quiet,” she says. “I was always reading and so shy growing up. Then I realised how much this was disadvantaging me. I wanted to connect with people so desperately, but I was getting in my own way. So at university, I was like, ‘OK I’m going to scare the crap out of myself’. I put my hand up in class to ask a question. And then, with small things like that, I built up my self-confidence of speaking in public, and people perceiving me, and not running away immediately when people looked at me.”

Now Omar’s work is featured in a ground-breaking new book, Ritual, a collection of work from 39 Muslim-Australian poets, published by Sweatshop Literacy Movement.