Tanzila Ahmed
Ontario, CA
Nonfiction
Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a political strategist, storyteller, and artist based in Los Angeles. She creates at the intersection of counternarratives and culture-shifting as a South Asian American Muslim 2nd-gen woman. She’s turned out over 500,000 Asian American voters, recorded five years of the award winning #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast and makes #MuslimVDay cards annually. Her essays are published in the anthologies, New Moons, Pretty Bitches, Whiter, Good Girls Marry Doctors, Love Inshallah, and in numerous online publications. She has published two poetry collections Emdash and Ellipses (2016) & The Day The Moon Split in Two (2020), is featured in Tia Chucha’s Coiled Serpent (2016) and her poetry has been commissioned by the Center for Cultural Power, PolicyLink, the Garment Worker Center, KPCC’s Unheard LA, and more. In Spring 2019 she was UCLA’s Activist-in-Residence at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, in Summer 2017 was Artist-in-Residence at Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art Culture & Design, and in 2016 received an award from President Obama’s White House as a Champion of Change in Art and Storytelling. A protest sign she designed for the 2017 Women’s March sits in the permanent archives of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.