Zahir Janmohamed
Assistant Professor of English and Director of the MMUF Program
Zahir Janmohamed received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded about food, race, gender, and class called Racist Sandwich was nominated for a James Beard Award.
He has received fellowships from MacDowell, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Anne Cox Chambers fellowship for long-form journalism, as well as from Tin House, the Arab American National Museum, The Mesa Refuge, the Djerassi Resident Arts Program, the Norman Mailer Center, and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. He is a three-time alumnus of the VONA workshop for writers of color, a 2017 fiction fellow at Kundiman, a 2017 New Voices Scholar, and the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Bakeless Fiction Scholarship at Bread Loaf.
His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, CNN, NPR, The Boston Review, The Guardian, McSweeney's, Scroll, The Wire, The Hindu, The Economic Times and many other publications.
Prior to beginning his writing career, he worked at Amnesty International, where he directed the organization's advocacy work on the Middle East and North Africa, and in the US Congress, where he served as a senior foreign policy aide.
Education
- MFA, University of Michigan
- MPP, University of California, Los Angeles
- BA, University of California, Berkeley