Randa Jarrar
Randa Jarrar is a Palestinian-American author, translator, performer, and professor.
Jarrar's first novel, the coming-of-age story A Map of Home (2008), won her the Hopwood Award, and an Arab American Book Award. Since then she has published short stories, essays in a number of anthologies and collections as well as her short story collection, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (2016), and her memoir, Love Is an Ex-Country (2021).
Jarrar was born in 1978 in Chicago, to an Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt. After the Gulf War in 1991, she and her family returned to the United States, living in the New York area.
Jarrar studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, receiving an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from
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Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. Her work has dealt with themes of national identity, mother-daughter relationships, and diasporic politics. In 2023, she was named the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
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Jhumpa Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
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Her debut collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture.
Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013) was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.
On January 22, 2015, Lahir -
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an acclaimed American writer known for his fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays that explored the complexities of consciousness, irony, and the human condition. Widely regarded as one of the most innovative literary voices of his generation, Wallace is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His unfinished final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. H -
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Spent part of her childhood in England. She began her education there, but concluded her A-levels in a missionary school back home, in the town of Mutare. She later studied medicine at Cambridge University, but became homesick and returned home as Zimbabwe's black-majority rule began in 1980.
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She took up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe, of whose drama group she was a member. She also held down a two-year job as a copywriter at a marketing agency. This early writing experience gave her an avenue for expression: she wrote numerous plays, such as The Lost of the Soil, and then joined the theatre group Zambuko, and participated in the production of two plays, Katshaa and Mavambo.
In 1985, Dangarembga published a short story in Sweden cal -
Rabih Alameddine
Rabih Alameddine (Arabic: ربيع علم الدين; born 1959) is an American painter and writer. His 2021 novel The Wrong End of the Telescope won the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
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Alameddine was born in Amman, Jordan to Lebanese Druze parents. He grew up in Kuwait and Lebanon, which he left at age 17 to live first in England and then in California to pursue higher education. He earned a degree in engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Master of Business in San Francisco.
Alameddine began his career as an engineer, then moved to writing and painting. His debut novel Koolaids, which touched on both the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco and the Lebanese Civil War, was published in 1998 by Picador.
The author of six -
Kamila Shamsie
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Karachi, where she grew up. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While at the University of Massachusetts she wrote In The City By The Sea , published by Granta Books UK in 1998. This first novel was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Award in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her 2000 novel Salt and Saffron led to Shamsie’s selection as one of Orange’s “21 Writers of the 21st Century.” With her third novel, Kartography , Shamsie was again shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys award in the UK. Both Kartography and her next novel, Broken Verse
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Renee Gladman
Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of “The Sympathizer,” awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His most recent book, “To Save and to Destroy,” explores the idea of being an outsider. He is also the author of the short story collection “The Refugees;” the nonfiction book “Nothing Ever Dies,” a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; the children's book “Simone” along with illustrator Minnie Phan; the sequel to “The Sympathizer,” “The Committed;” the nonfiction book “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial,” longlisted for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, “The Displaced,” as well as a co-editor of
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Miriam Zoila Pérez
Miriam Zoila Pérez is an award-winning queer Cuban writer and activist. Their work, which mostly looks at the intersections of race, health and gender, is motivated by a desire to understand how the world shapes our bodies, and to explore all the many solutions that already exist for some of our biggest problems, but simply don’t get the attention they deserve.
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Their debut young adult fiction novel, Camila Núñez’s Year of Disasters, will be published by Page Street YA in 2025. They will also be publishing a non-fiction book with their podcast co-host Verónica Bayetti Flores, Muévelo, published by Running Press.
Their writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian and Colorlines, among other outlets. Pérez’s work has appeared in a nu -
Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, she specialized in trauma and addiction work with various populations.
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Her memoir, I'll Tell You When I'm Home is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in June 2025.
She has published two novels, her debut Salt Houses (2017), is the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and her second novel, The Arsonists' City (2021).
Alyan's poetry collections include Atrium (2012), winner of the 2013 Arab America -
Saleem Haddad
Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City to an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father.
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His first novel, Guapa, was published in 2016, receiving critical acclaim from The New Yorker, The Guardian, and others, and was awarded both a Stonewall Honour and the 2017 Polari First Book Prize.
He has also published a number of short stories, including for the Palestinian sci-fi anthology Palestine +100. He also writes for film and television; his directorial debut, Marco, premiered in March 2019 and was nominated for the 2019 Iris Prize for ‘Best British Short Film’. His work has been supported by institutions such as Yaddo and the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.
He is currently based in Lisbon, with roots in London, Amman, and Beirut -
Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific N
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Zeyn Joukhadar
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of The Thirty Names of Night, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist. His work has appeared in the Kink anthology, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar guest edited Mizna's 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue, serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.
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Jokha Alharthi جوخة الحارثي
Jokha al-Harthi (Arabic: جوخة الحارثي; born July 1978) is an Omani writer and academic. She was educated in Oman and in the United Kingdom. She obtained her PhD in classical Arabic literature from Edinburgh University. She is currently an associate professor in the Arabic department at Sultan Qaboos University.
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al-Harthi has published three collections of short stories and three novels (Manamat, Sayyidat el-Qamar and Narinjah). She has also authored academic works. Her work has been translated into English, Serbian, Korean, Italian, and German and published in Banipal magazine. She was also one of eight participants in the 2011 IPAF Nadwa (writers' workshop). al-Harthi won the Sultan Qaboos Award for Culture, Arts and Literature, for her no -
Geena Rocero
Geena Rocero is a Filipino-born American model, TED speaker, and transgender advocate based in New York City. Rocero is the founder of Gender Proud, a media production company that tells stories of the transgender community worldwide to elevate justice and equality.
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Sonora Reyes
Born and raised in Arizona, Sonora Reyes writes fiction full of queer and Latine characters in a variety of genres, with current projects in both kidlit and adult categories.
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Outside of writing, Sonora loves breaking their body and vocal chords by playing with their baby niblings, and dancing/singing karaoke at the same time. -
Mohammed El-Kurd
MOHAMMED EL-KURD is an internationally touring and award-winning poet, writer, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine.
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In 2021, He was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine.
He is best known for his role as a co-founder of the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement. His work has been featured in numerous international outlets and he has appeared repeatedly as a commentator on major TV networks.
Currently, El-Kurd serves as the first-ever Palestine Correspondent for The Nation. His first published essay in this role, "A Night with Palestine's Defenders of the Mountain," was shortlisted for the 2022 One World Media Print Award.
RIFQA, his debut collection of poetry, was published by Haymarket -
Ghassan Zeineddine
Ghassan Zeineddine was born in Washington, DC, and raised in the Middle East.
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He is the author of the short story collection Dearborn (2023) and coeditor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging (2022).
His fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, The Arkansas International, Witness, Pleiades, Fiction International, The Common, Epiphany, FOLIO, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and the Iron Horse Literary Review, among other publications.
He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College and has previously taught at the American University of Beirut, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Kenyon Col -
Mary Relindes Ellis
Mary Relindes Ellis was born in Glidden, Wisconsin. After attending a business school to obtain certification as a legal secretary, Ellis then went on to get a B.A. in English Literature with an emphasis on minority and women’s literature. Throughout her life she has worked at a number of positions: cleaning cabins at an upscale resort; assisting her mother, who was a public health nurse; working as an administrative staff support member for entomologists, wildlife and fisheries biologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, engineers, architects, and eventually as the associate administrator in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. She formerly owned a 100-acre farm, co-operated a Christmas wreath business, and grew local ge
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Zeyn Joukhadar
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of The Thirty Names of Night, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist. His work has appeared in the Kink anthology, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar guest edited Mizna's 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue, serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.
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Ghassan Zeineddine
Ghassan Zeineddine was born in Washington, DC, and raised in the Middle East.
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He is the author of the short story collection Dearborn (2023) and coeditor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging (2022).
His fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, The Arkansas International, Witness, Pleiades, Fiction International, The Common, Epiphany, FOLIO, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and the Iron Horse Literary Review, among other publications.
He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College and has previously taught at the American University of Beirut, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Kenyon Col -
Geena Rocero
Geena Rocero is a Filipino-born American model, TED speaker, and transgender advocate based in New York City. Rocero is the founder of Gender Proud, a media production company that tells stories of the transgender community worldwide to elevate justice and equality.
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Iliana Regan
Iliana Regan is a self-taught chef. She is the founder and owner of the Michelin-starred “new gatherer” restaurant Elizabeth and the Japanese-inspired pub Kitsune, both located in Chicago. Her cuisine highlights her midwestern roots and the pure flavor of the often foraged ingredients of her upbringing. A James Beard Award and Jean Banchet Award nominee, Regan was named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs 2016.
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Putsata Reang
Putsata Reang is an author and a journalist whose writings have appeared in The New York Times, Politico, The Guardian, Ms, and The Seattle Times, among other publications.
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Putsata was born in Cambodia, and raised in rural Oregon, surrounded by berry farms where she and her family hustled to earn their middle class existence. Her memoir Ma and Me explores the glades of displacement felt by children of refugees, and the overlay of emotional exile that comes with being gay.
Putsata has lived and worked in more than a dozen countries, including Cambodia, Afghanistan and Thailand. She is an alum of Hedgebrook, Mineral School, and Kimmel Harding Nelson residencies. She is a 2019 Jack Straw fellow. In 2005, she received an Alicia Patterson Journali