Samina Ali

Samina Ali is an award-winning author, activist and cultural commentator. Her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, won France’s prestigious Prix du Premier Roman Etranger Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. Ali’s work is driven by her belief in personal narrative as a force for achieving women’s individual and political freedom and in harnessing the power of media for social transformation. She is the curator of the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed virtual exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices. Her current project, a memoir of her near-death experience delivering her firstborn, takes an unsparing look at gender bias and the crisis of preventable maternal deaths in the U.S. Ali is a former cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and Daily Beast. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Vogue, National Public Radio (NPR) and elsewhere.