Fatimah Asghar In Conversation with Michael Dumanis

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Join Michael Dumanis in a Q&A with visiting poet Fatimah Asghar.

Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim poet, novelist, and screenwriter. They are the author of Daughter of the Mountains: Poems of Heartbreak and Homecoming (One World/Random House, 2026); the poetry collection If They Come for Us (One World, 2018); and the novel When We Were Sisters (One World, 2023), a New York Public Library Young Lions Award finalist, which was longlisted for the National Book Award, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me, Asghar is also the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series highlighting friendship among women of color. They are the recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and one of Forbes Magazine’s 2018 Thirty Under Thirty in Hollywood & Entertainment.

A short film by Fatimah Asghar will be screened as part of their reading.

Photo © Ciera Dunbar