Photo credit: Leah Margulies

Malaka Gharib is a journalist, cartoonist and graphic novelist.

She is the author of "I Was Their American Dream," a graphic memoir published in 2019 about being first-generation Filipino Egyptian American, which won an Arab American Book Award in 2020. In 2022, she published "It Won't Always Be Like This," a graphic memoir about her summers in the Middle East, which was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.

Her comics, zines and writing have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Catapult, The Believer Magazine, The Nib, The Margins and The New Yorker. She has been profiled in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Her comics and zines are archived at the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, the Arab American Museum and Barnard College’s Zine Library. Her art and writing have been exhibited at the Fantagraphics Books, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery.

She has spoken at the Filipino American International Book Festival, the Emirates Literature Festival, The Muse and the Marketplace, Unbound Book Festival, the Massachusetts Independent Comics Festival, Short Run Comix Festival and The Small Press Expo. She has led zine workshops at institutions such as Weill Cornell Medicine, Vanderbilt University, University of California, Riverside, San Diego State University, George Washington University and more.

By day, she is an editor at NPR. She lives in Nashville, Tenn., with her husband, son and Shiba Inu.

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Represented by Daniel Greenberg of LGR Literary Agency

Watch my TEDx talk: How to find a better version of your life story