Writer and Editor.

About Me

An award-winning journalist, Nafeesa Syeed has worked across the U.S., South Asia, Middle East, and North and East Africa. At The Associated Press, Nafeesa was a staff writer in the Iowa and Washington bureaus. She served as a national security reporter in Washington and Middle East correspondent in Dubai, for Bloomberg News. As a producer, she worked on Peabody-winning and Emmy-nominated documentaries at Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English. She was also a longform editor at The Caravan, a New Delhi-based magazine. Nafeesa is co-author of the nonfiction book Arab Women Rising, published by Wharton. She now works as an opinion editor at the LA Times.

Nafeesa is currently a visiting scholar at UCLA’s International Institute, completing her first novel. She’s the 2021-22 Writing in Color Fellow at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. Previously, Nafeesa was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and University of Pennsylvania. Her work has also appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Al-Monitor, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, VICE, Tehelka, Guernica, Quartz, and The Believer.

She has a B.A. from Georgetown University and M.A. in comparative literature from SOAS-University of London.