Malaka Gharib!

One of the most exciting parts of Unbound is the opportunity to introduce festival guests to brilliant new writers. We have a particularly bumper crop this year, including the very wonderful Malaka Gharib. In addition to appearing with Kristen Radtke to talk about graphic memoirs on Saturday, Malaka will also be participating in the “Authors in the Schools” project on Friday. We can’t wait!

Malaka Gharib is an artist and a journalist based in Washington, D.C. She is the author of "I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir," about being first-generation Filipino Egyptian American. She is a writer and editor on NPR's science desk, reporting on global health and development topics such as humanitarian aid and gender and income inequality. 

She also writes for NPR on her experience as the child of immigrants, from talking to her Filipino mom about mental health to hosting an Eid feast for her Muslim father. Her art -- including a comic on the history of pimiento cheese in the Philippines and eating Chinese food in Paris -- has been published in Catapult, The Nib, Saveur Magazine, NPR, The Washington City Paper, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The New York Times Style Magazine. She is the founder of the D.C. Art Book Fair and The Runcible Spoon, a zine about food and fantasy. 

She graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University with a dual major in magazine journalism and marketing.