Photo credit: Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography
I was born in Washington, D.C., in 1980 and grew up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. My parents had intended to raise me and my sister in Beirut, Lebanon, where we are originally from, but at the time the country was mired in civil war. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, we moved to D.C. Since then, I have lived in New York City, Beirut, Milwaukee, Mount Vernon (a small town in central Ohio), and Dearborn, Michigan. Currently, I am an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. I have previously taught at the American University of Beirut, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Kenyon College, and the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
In my fiction writing, tragedy and comedy work in tandem, and in some cases, comedy transcends tragedy by embodying a broader range of emotions. When I put words down on the page, I am most comfortable processing and dramatizing distressing matters through a comedic approach. It is not easy to make a reader laugh, and I am not sure if I am always successful at it. Let me admit the following horror: I laugh at my own jokes. It is a curse that I have inherited from my father’s side of the family. My paternal grandfather would burst into laughter before he even finished his jokes, as did my father. I am trying to improve in this regard.