Samina Ali

Samina’s debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004), was the winner of France’s prestigious Prix Premier Roman Étranger Award and a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction and the California Book Reviewers Award. Poets & Writers Magazine named it a Top Debut of the Year. Samina is a recipient of fiction awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. NPR has featured Samina on both national and local stations. She’s been a regular columnist for the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and she has written for the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Child magazine. She has also been a consultant for iTVS and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Samina’s essay “Labor of Love” was included in the anthology All the Women in My Family Sing: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom, edited by Deborah Santana. Samina is an influential advocate and spokesperson for Muslim women’s rights worldwide, who has served as a cultural ambassador to several European countries for the U.S. State Department. She is a founding member of American Muslim feminist organization Daughters of Hajar. The group’s peaceful march into a mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, to advance equality became part of the documentary The Mosque in Morgantown, which aired nationwide on PBS as part of the series America at a Crossroads. Samina was a featured speaker at the 2017 conference of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, an international advocacy organization founded by five women Peace Prize laureates. In 2013, she curated the acclaimed global exhibition Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, showcasing work by Muslim women artists, activists, and thought leaders around the world. Samina’s second book will be out in March 2025 with Catapult. Pieces You’ll Never Get Back is a harrowing memoir about her unlikely survival after the birth of her son. Throughout, Ali weaves in beliefs from her Islamic upbringing that are significant to her seven-year journey of recovery — thoughts surrounding death, the afterlife, resurrection, and reincarnation — illuminating surprising commonalities between Islam and Christianity and other faiths. Pieces You’ll Never Get Back is both deeply personal and an inspiring example of human determination and courage for anyone facing overwhelming odds.