Uzma Aslam Khan, associate professor of fiction writing, received an M.F.A in creative writing from the University of Arizona.
Uzma is the author of five novels translated worldwide to critical acclaim. These include Trespassing, nominated for the Commonwealth Prize in 2003; The Geometry of God, a Kirkus Reviews’ Best Book of 2009; and Thinner than Skin, nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2014. Her short fiction has twice won a Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize, and appeared in Granta, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry and Prose, AGNI, and Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Guardian, Counterpunch, Drawbridge, Herald and Dawn, among other national and international periodicals and journals, on topics that include women and the arts, U.S. foreign policy, racism and Islamophobia, particularly in representations of Muslim women.
Uzma’s newest novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, is out now in the US. Set in the British penal settlement of the Andaman Islands during the 1930s, through the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the book, twenty-seven years in the making, writes into being the stories of those caught in the vortex of history, yet written out of it. Central to the novel, then, are questions of whose histories we believe, elevate, celebrate—and whose we erase. The questions are central also to Uzma’s teaching. Her courses offer a global perspective on creative writing and literature, existing at the intersection of art, history, racial justice, and environmental justice, with an emphasis on communities displaced by colonialism and war.
Uzma has taught in Morocco, Pakistan, and Hawai’i. She joined Hampshire College in Fall 2012.
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