Meet the contributors of NEW MOONS, an anthology celebrating Muslim writers!

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). Tarfia’s poems appear widely in magazines and anthologies in the United States and abroad and have been translated into Bengali, Spanish, Farsi, and Chinese. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and many other honors, Tarfia presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide. In 2016, Harvard Law School named her as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. Tarfia was born to Bangladeshi immigrants in Brooklyn, NY, and grew up in Texas.

Sheba Karim is the author of Skunk Girl, That Thing We Call a Heart, Mariam Sharma Hits the Road, and The Marvelous Mirza Girls. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is based in Nashville, TN, where she is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University.

Ramy El-Etreby is a queer, Muslim, Arab American theatre artist, writer, performer, storyteller and educator based in Los Angeles. His solo theatre show The Ride played an acclaimed run at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2019, which earned him the Encore Producer’s Award. His writings appear online on PopSugar, Medium, The Huffington Post, Queerty, KCET, Love Inshallah, as well as in print in the 2014 anthology Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy published by Beacon Press and the 2019 anthology Graffiti published by Aunt Lute Books. Ramy works in arts education and has held teaching artist positions with LA theater companies Geffen Playhouse and Center Theatre Group. Ramy holds an MA in applied theatre from the CUNY School of Professional Studies and is a VONA/Voices writing fellow.

Serena W. Lin believes writing is a political act of connection and cuts their teeth on monsters, myth, and magic. Serena writes fiction, poetry, blogs, essays, plays, reviews. Their works have appeared in The Rumpus, Drunken Boat/Anomaly, cream city review, Hyphen, Bitch, Hyperallergic, among other outlets. Serena is a community lawyer and former public defender. They’re an alum of VONA and Rutgers-Newark. Website: www.SerenaWLin.com

Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi’s forthcoming memoir-in-stories, “Ayat,” was a finalist for the First Pages Prize and the Chautauqua Foundation’s Janus Prize, recognizing an emerging writer’s work for daring innovations that reorder literary conventions and readers’ imaginations. Her writing has appeared in Entropy magazine’s Top 25, No Tokens, and PANK, and has been recognized with support from Millay Arts, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Creative Fellowship, and the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship. She taught personal essay to Washington DC high school students for PEN/Faulkner. Find her online as @heyayeh.

Deonna Kelli Sayed is an author and performer based in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is a collector of experiences, from working with a French chef to organizing Greensboro Bound: A Literary Festival. Her work is featured in Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women and in Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction From a Global Planet. She represents PEN America as the NC Piedmont Representative and works for the North Carolina Writers’ Network.

Uzma Aslam Khan is an award-winning author of five novels that include Trespassing, nominated for a 2003 Commonwealth Prize; The Geometry of God, one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2009, and winner of the Bronze award at the Independent Book Publishers Awards; Thinner Than Skin, longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and winner of the inaugural French Embassy Prize for Best Fiction at the Karachi Literature Festival 2014. Khan’s new novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, out in India, Pakistan, and Sweden, is forthcoming in the US and UK in spring 2022. It won the ninth UBL Literary Awards English Language Fiction category 2020 and the Karachi Literature Festival-Getz Pharma Fiction Prize 2021.

Khan’s work has appeared in Granta, The Massachusetts Review, Guardian, Nimrod International Journal, AGNI, Calyx, Counterpunch, Drawbridge, and Dawn, among other periodicals and journals. Website: https://www.uzmaaslamkhan.com

Leila C. Nadir is an interspecies kin-maker, creative-critical researcher, undisciplined storyteller, and eccentric educator. She is also Assistant Professor and Founding Director of the Environmental Humanities Program at a university in New York State. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York Council on the Arts. She is currently finishing a memoir about growing up in an Afghan-American, Muslim-Catholic family during the Cold War.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Ahmed has received The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Sehrish Ranjha’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. She divides her time between Los Angeles and Lahore, Pakistan.

Deema Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received the Northern California Book Award’s NCBR Recognition Award. She is also co-author of Diaspo/Renga with Marilyn Hacker and the winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018. Deema’s work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Literary Imagination, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Poetry London, and Crab Orchard, to name a few. Her work has been translated into French, Farsi, and Arabic, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times.

Zara Chowdhary has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. She has served as Visual Arts Editor for the literary journal Flyway. She has also worked as a screenwriter in Mumbai and produced for films and advertising for ten years. She enjoys working at the intersection of environmental and political equity through her fiction, nonfiction, and occasional dabbling in poetry.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press) and the chapbooks Ebb and Tunsiya/Amrikiya. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her work appears in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Anisa Rahim is a writer and public interest lawyer. Her poetry has appeared in BlazeVOX, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Red Eft Review, OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters (O:JA&L), The Newest Americans: Stories from the Global City, Common Ground Review, Kissing Dynamite’s anthology PUNK, and elsewhere. Her hybrid memoir, “American Meo: A History of Remembering and Forgetting” was longlisted for the 2019 PANK Book Contest. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers–Newark. See more of her work at anisarahim.com.

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award–winning journalist, medical doctor, poet, professor, and author of three books, including Muslim Women Are Everything (HarperCollins). Yasmin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for breaking news reporting. Her poetry collection, For Filthy Women Who Worry About Disappointing God, was winner of the Diode Editions poetry chapbook contest. Yasmin is director of the Stanford Center for Health Communication and clinical assistant professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Barrak Alzaid (@barrakstar) is a writer, artist, and curator. His work in progress is Fabulous, a memoir relating his queer coming-of-age in Kuwait—a story of family fracture and reconciliation. He was a 2018 Lambda Literary Retreat fellow, and his work has been published in Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, NAILED, and the anthology The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Tales from Many Muslim Worlds (Penguin SEA). His poem “faaehggot” was awarded a first-place prize by Nasiona magazine in their inaugural micrononfiction and poetry competition. He is a founding member of the artist collective GCC.

Sarah Ghazal Ali is a Bay Area poet and Editor-in-Chief of Palette Poetry. She obtained her MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was a Juniper Fellow and MFA Fellow. Nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets, she has received scholarships from ISF, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Seventh Wave. Her poems appear in or are forthcoming from Pleiades, Waxwing, Tinderbox, and others. Find her at www.sarahgali.com, and on Twitter @caesarah_.

Hilal Isler’s writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books online, and elsewhere. She teaches college social justice.

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani-American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press 2018), and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is a Poets House 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow.

Hayan Charara is the author of four poetry books—The Alchemist’s Diary, The Sadness of Others, Something Sinister, and These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit—and a children’s book, The Three Lucys. He also edited Inclined to Speak, an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry, and with Fady Joudah edits the Etel Adnan Poetry Series. He teaches in the creative writing program and the Honors College at the University of Houston.

Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a political activist, storyteller, poet, and artist based in Los Angeles. She creates at the intersection of counternarratives and culture-shifting as a South Asian American Muslim second-gen woman. She’s turned out over 500,000 Asian American voters, recorded her #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast at the White House, and makes #MuslimVDay cards annually. Her essays are published in the anthologies Pretty Bitches, Shades of Prejudice, Good Girls Marry Doctors, Love Inshallah, and numerous online publications.

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her latest novel The Arsonists’ City was released by HMH earlier this year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, LitHub, the New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist and teaches creative writing and graduate psychology at New York University.

Alicia Razvi is a farmer, a baker, and a writer. She gratefully owns a sustainable microfarm in Wisconsin with her husband and three kids. She is living a dream life of growing, raising, producing, and advocating for local food. Alicia became the first Muslim chapter president of Farmers Union in 2016 and is active in the role still today. She is very new in her writing journey with just one other publication to date.

Omar Sarwar was born in New York City. He has trekked to Mt. Everest’s base, sung with the Singapore Philharmonic Chamber Choir, and spent his early childhood in the heart of Tokyo. Omar has written for publications like HuffPost and The Advocate on religion and sexuality. When not writing, he enjoys bhangra, metaphysics, and giving people dating advice he never follows. The enclosed story is derived from his experiences as a young boy living in Japan as a Pakistani expatriate.

Haroon Moghul is a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He’s been published widely, including by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Foreign Policy, and contributed original content to NPR’s Fresh Air. In 2016, he was honored with the Religion News Writer’s Awards for Religion Reporting Excellence. Haroon is the author of three books, including How to be a Muslim: An American Story, which the Washington Post called “an extraordinary gift,” and “an authentic portrayal of a vastly misunderstood community.” Previously, he was a Fellow at Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security and with the National Security Studies Program at New America Foundation. Haroon is a member of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Engagement at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He played a critical role in the development of the Islamic Center at New York University and continues to advise Muslim community institutions and organizations. He graduated from Columbia University with an MA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. He once designed and led heritage tours of Spain, Turkey, and Bosnia, which was some of the coolest work he’s ever done. His next book brings together theology, autobiography, and a little bit of comedy to introduce Islam to a mainstream audience.

Shamima Khan published her first poem at age seven. She is a recipient of the City of Ottawa Youth poetry award and a finalist for the CBC poetry contest. She has most recently been published in the anthology Muslim American Writers at Home (Freedom Voices Press, 2021). Shamima has been invited to perform her poetry at conferences, embassies, protests, arts events and peace marches across Canada. Shamima is currently at work on a chapbook of her creative nonfiction while leading an Inclusive Design team to create human-centered products and technology.

Zohra Saed is a Brooklyn-based Afghan American poet. She is the co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press), editor of Langston Hughes: Poems, Photos, and Notebooks from Turkestan (Lost & Found, The CUNY Poetics Documents Initiative); and Woman. Hand/Pen. (Belladonna Chaplet). Her essays on the Central Asian diaspora have appeared in Eating Asian America (NYU Press) and The Asian American Literary Review. She co-founded UpSet Press, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit indie press, with poet Robert Booras. “Aqua Net Days” was an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Very Short Story Contest (Summer 2018).

Yahya Frederickson’s poetry collections include In a Homeland Not Far: New & Selected Poems (Press 53 2017), The Gold Shop of Ba-‘Ali (Lost Horse Press 2014), and four chapbooks, most recently The Birds of al-Merjeh Square: Poems from Syria (Finishing Line Press 2014). A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Yemen and Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Kyrgyzstan, he is a professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

Noor Ibn Najam is a poet who teases, challenges, breaks, and creates language. She’s a Fellow of Callaloo, The Watering Hole, and The Vermont Studio Center with poems published by the Academy of American Poets, The Rumpus, and others. Her chapbook, Praise to Lesser Gods of Love, was published by Glass poetry press in 2019 and contemplates the ever-shifting role of love in the human experience and how best to worship such a multitudinous deity.

Hana Qwfan is a Muslim Yemeni American writer. She has her bachelor’s degree in Sociology and English Literature from CSUB. Hana formerly worked as a nonfiction editor for Synaesthesia Magazine, as well as a writer for UC Berkeley’s threads, a magazine run by and for Muslim college students. You can find her previous work at threadsatcal.org, or see her Twitter @itsaplatesworld. Her writing is usually inspired by her religion and by her father, Ali.

Sham-e-Ali Nayeem is the author of City of Pearls (UpSet Press, 2019). Raised in both the UK and the US, she is a Hyderabadi poet, interdisciplinary artist and recovering social justice lawyer. A graduate of Oberlin College, her poetry has appeared in anthologies, including Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Olive Branch Press, 2005), Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak (Beacon Press, 2005) and Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to Violence (Seal Press, 2008). Sham-e-Ali is the recipient of the 2016 Loft Literary Center Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship.

Farah Ghafoor’s poems are forthcoming or published in Room, Ninth Letter, Big Lucks, Halal if You Hear Me (Haymarket Books 2019), and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. She is the editor-in-chief of Sugar Rascals magazine and attends the University of Toronto.

Aatif Rashid is the author of the novel Portrait of Sebastian Khan. He’s published stories in The Massachusetts Review, Arcturus, Barrelhouse, and Triangle House, and nonfiction in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, and other places. He currently writes regularly for The Kenyon Review blog.