#Muslim Authors Showcase: Let’s Get Lit Book Fest

Hello and Salaam to my Muslim siblings!

Welcome to the #MuslimAuthors Week of the Let’s Get Lit Online Book Fest.

The Let’s Get Lit Online Book Fest is a six week long online event to celebrate and highlight debut and marginalised authors with books coming out this year. You can find out more about the fest on our official Twitter page here and our Instagram page here.

This week, I will be hosting Muslim authors along with Rameela @Star Is All Booked Up. Keep your eyes on our blogs throughout this week as we’ll be hosting interviews, a panel and a showcase with these authors this week.

Today, I’ll be introducing the authors who will be featured this week!

(Book title= title+goodreads link)

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Sahar Mustafah

Author of THE BEAUTY OF YOUR FACE. Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. Her short stories have been awarded the Guild Literary Complex Prize for fiction, a Distinguished Story honor from Best American Short Stories, and three Pushcart Prize nominations, among other honors. She writes and teaches outside of Chicago.

Sahira Javaid

Author of CROWNING SOUL. Sahira started her website Essentuate Life to inspire others with her poetry and share her love of books to encourage other writers.

Sahira is the author of Bitter Sweet and Hot Ice, her two poetry books she published in 2011. Her latest poetry book Crack of Dawn was released August 2017. She is working to get her Fantasy novel published.

Intisar Khanani

Author of THORN. She was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and grew up a nomad, with multiple stints living in Saudi Arabia, boarding school in New Hampshire, and college split between Minnesota and Colorado. Her family is from Pakistan, and still has extended family there. She, her husband, two young daughters live in Cincinnati, Ohio. Until a few years ago, she worked with the Cincinnati Health Department on projects to improve community health, which was as close as she could get to saving the world. Now she focuses her time on her two passions: raising her family and writing.

Author of No True Believers. Rabiah York Lumbard is an award-winning author of the picture book The Conference of the Birds (Wisdom Tales, 2012). Her latest picture book, The Gift of Ramadan (Albert Whitman, 2019) was highly recommended by SLJ as “a perfect addition to holiday book collections,” while her deeply personal debut novel No True Believers (Crown, 2020), which draws on her experience as an American Muslim at home and abroad has been hailed by Booklist as “taut debut novel” and “a page-turner that carries a message of radical love, regardless of faith.” She is also the 2015 winner of the Middle East Book Award for her picture book When the Animals Saved Earth. This multicultural environmental tale is inspired by a 1,000-year-old animal fable from 10th century Muslim Iraq that was originally translated by a Jewish rabbi at the command of a Christian king in the 14th century. Her interfaith book Everyone Prays: Celebrating Faith Around the World received the Eric Hoffer Award in 2015.

20200516_193248_0000 — ***Marzieh Abbas***

Author of Hamza and Aliya share the Ramadan Cheer. Home-baker, picture book maker, Mom by day, dreamer by night.

Author of This Is All Your Fault. Aminah Mae Safi is a Muslim-American writer who explores art, fiction, feminism, and film. She’s the winner of the We Need Diverse Books short story contest. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner and two cats. She is the author of NOT THE GIRLS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR (Feiwel and Friends), TELL ME HOW YOU REALLY FEEL (Feiwel and Friends), and the forthcoming THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT (Feiwel and Friends, October 2020) and the Reclaimed Classics ROBIN HOOD (Winter 2022).

Author of THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT. Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020), a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and a member of American Mensa. His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, The Saturday Evening Post, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and others.

Author of Afraid to Fall. Romance author. Muslim, wife, and mother.

Author of LIKE THE MOON LOVES THE SKY and contributor to the anthology, ONCE UPON AN EID. Like so many other writers, she grew up with her nose in a book. Her mother believed children should be seen reading and not heard whining about boredom, and regularly took her to the Rockville Public Library with grocery bags to fill with books. Along with grabbing new titles each visit, she often chose the same ones over and over again. And she reread treasured personal copies of my favorites until they fell apart.

The books she connected with as a child left a bigger impression on her than almost anything she comes across today. She still thinks of the characters, stories, random facts and tidbits that she absorbed years ago. That’s why she loves writing for kids—in the hopes that they’ll pick up something she write more than once, and let it become part of who they are.

Author of The Candle and the Flame. Nafiza Azad was born in Fiji and spent the first seventeen years of her life as a self-styled Pacific Islander. Now she identifies as an Indo-Fijian Muslim Canadian, which means she is often navigating multiple identities. Nafiza has a love for languages and currently speaks four. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Children’s Literature from the University of British Columbia and co-runs The Book Wars (thebookwars.ca), a website dedicated to all things children’s literature. Nafiza currently lives in British Columbia with her family.

Author of A PLACE AT THE TABLE. Saadia Faruqi is a Pakistani American author, essayist and interfaith activist. She writes the children’s early reader series “Yasmin” published by Capstone and other books for children, including middle grade novels “A Place At The Table” (HMH/Clarion 2020) co-written with Laura Shovan, and “A Thousand Questions” (Harper Collins 2020). She has also written “Brick Walls: Tales of Hope & Courage from Pakistan” a short story collection for adults and teens. Saadia is editor-in-chief of Blue Minaret, a magazine for Muslim art, poetry and prose, and was featured in Oprah Magazine in 2017 as a woman making a difference in her community. She resides in Houston, TX with her husband and children.

Farah Zaman

Author of The Hour of the Oryx. As a young girl, Farah spent many hours with her head buried in books of mystery, intrigue and adventure. The inevitable outcome was picking up pen and paper to create her own stories and poems, which she enjoyed sharing with family, friends and classmates alike. Farah has spent most of her life working with words, something that she loves doing. One of her greatest treats to herself is curling up with a good book and getting lost in it. Her love of reading coupled with her love of writing gave Farah the impetus to start her journey as an author. Farah presently lives in New York with her family.

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Fariha Khayyam

Author of SHARDS. While growing up reading about dragons, magic and adventures, Fariha Khayyam had always wanted to write a book. As her love for reading grew, so did her dream.
She began nurturing her dream while completing her Masters of Business Administration from Loyola University Chicago, Illinois.
Based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when she is not writing, she is found reading fantasy novels or spending time on her social media.

Catch the other events on the fest on these blogs: