Thank you for your interest in my work!
Here are the larger writing projects I’m working on:
Redneck Palestinian: Life in the Crosshairs of a Culture Clash
Growing up, I was called darlin’ by one half of my family and habiti-ti by the other. Holiday dinners at one grandma’s house included cornbread, black-eyed peas, and apple pie––while at teta’s house we ate falafel, grape leaves, and homemade bread that would’ve been labeled “old world loaves” at the store.
When my Southern redneck mother divorced my Palestinian father before I was old enough to remember them ever living together, my life became characterized by this split––and the desire to make sense of both sides of my family when I didn’t feel I truly belonged to either.
In this essay collection, I explores my Southern side, my Palestinian side, and what it means to live at the intersection of this uncommon identity. Between the aspects of each culture I willingly embrace and vehemently oppose, I realize my redneck family and my Palestinian family are more alike than they are different.
Some of the essays included in this collection have been published in The Rumpus, Entropy Magazine, Deep South Magazine, and Mizna Magazine (print only).
I am currently seeking representation from literary agents. Please reach out via my contact page if you feel we’d be a good fit!
Hometown: A Novel
At the height of the 2008 recession, Katha is torn over which set of rules she’s supposed to follow for her life. How can she get a good job if she quits her internship? How can she pay for college if the internship doesn’t pay? How can she take an internship when she has to work to put herself through school?
Katha doesn’t hate her tiny hometown in rural Alabama––she even finds its plethora of oddball residents kind of endearing. There’s just one problem… Nothing ever happens here.
Or so she thought.
When the staunchly rule-following, play-by-the-book Katha starts interning at the small county newspaper, the world she knew of her modest hometown gets a lot bigger. The residents get more eccentric. The crime gets weirder. The newspaper itself seems to operate under some code Katha can’t crack. This place she knew and loved becomes a town she only thought she knew and needs to run away from.
A love letter to Millennials, media, and small, quirky hometowns everywhere, Hometown: A Novel is a story for our time.
The genre is literary fiction with a touch of magical realism. This is currently all unpublished material, though you can see an example of my fiction in this short story published in
The Normal School.
The first draft of this novel is complete (~57,000 words) and is in the process of being edited.