Malaka Gharib is a journalist, cartoonist and graphic novelist. She is the author of I Was Their American Dream, winner of the 2020 Arab American Book Award, and It Won’t Always Be Like This, a graphic memoir about her summers in the middle east.
By day, she works as a digital editor at NPR for Life Kit, a lifestyle podcast about health, finance, relationships and more. Her comics and writing have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Catapult, The Believer Magazine and The New Yorker. She has been profiled in The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Some of 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 has been exhibited at 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.
“Malaka is a dream speaker to work with. Leading up to our webinar, she collaborated on the event content so that the panel came in confident and on the same page about the direction of the discussion. Her participation in the panel was vulnerable and joyful. Malaka provided wonderful insight to the audience about identity, belonging, and coming of age.” – Facing History & Ourselves, 2023
