Malaka Gharib is a journalist, cartoonist and graphic novelist.

She is the author of "I Was Their American Dream," a graphic memoir published in 2019 about being first-generation Filipino Egyptian American, which won an Arab American Book Award in 2020. In 2022, she published "It Won't Always Be Like This," a graphic memoir about her summers in the Middle East.

By day, is the digital editor of the NPR podcast Life Kit. Previously, she was an editor on NPR's global health and development desk; worked for Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s charity, Malala Fund; and Bono’s campaign to end global poverty, ONE.

Her comics and writing have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Catapult, The Believer Magazine, The Nib and The New Yorker. She has been profiled in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

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 Fantagraphics Books, 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.

She graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University and lives in Nashville, Tenn., with her husband, son and Shiba Inu.

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Represented by Daniel Greenberg of LGR Literary Agency