Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020) as well as The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018), which won the 2018 Middle East Book Award, was a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and was translated into twenty languages. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, Shondaland, [PANK], Mizna, and elsewhere and has been included in anthologies such as Letters to a Writer of Color, This Arab Is Queer, KINK: Stories (eds. RO Kwon & Garth Greenwell), and others. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar guest edited the Queer + Trans Voices issue of Mizna, serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Program, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI). Joukhadar is currently at work on an immersive, site-specific theatrical adaptation of The Thirty Names of Night, commissioned by Noor Theatre Company in New York City, as well as a new novel.
Joukhadar is represented by Michelle Brower of Aevitas Creative Management. For speaking engagements, he is represented by Books In Common.
Photo credit: Leah James, 2023.