Hi, I’m Nahal Suzanne Jamir, and I’m a professional writer, having written and published my work for over twenty years. My main genres are fiction and nonfiction, but sometimes I write poetry.

In college, I began writing for real, not in the confines of a diary or a childhood bedroom but with a consideration for audience. Ironically, I fell in love with writing while majoring in biochemistry to please my mother. We all experience pressure while finding the right path and creating things that hold meaning for us. Don’t worry: I disappointed her by becoming a writer and professor in the humanities. She kept on being my mother anyway. 

My fiction often engages with fantastical modes, like fabulism, and utilizes lore, sometimes even retelling older stories (myths, fairy tales). My fiction and nonfiction are frequently about family and my heritage as a second-generation Iranian-American. 

My work has been recently published in peer-reviewed journals like Ploughshares 
and StoryQuarterly. I have published one short fiction collection titled In the Middle of Many Mountains (Press 53). You can see more publications (and read many pieces in their entirety!) on the Writing page. 

My current projects include two book-length works-in-progress. One is a memoir titled Girl-Snake: Memoirs of an Immigrant’s Daughter where I grapple with my heritage using hyper-fragmentation and other postmodern techniques to reflect identity both densely packed and pulled impossibly thin. My other work in progress is a second collection of stories titled American Names that features immigrants struggling with identity in everyday spaces and situations—and even struggling with something as simple as their names…mispronounced, misunderstood, or mocked. So, they try to change, but don’t worry: my characters never disappoint me. They won’t disappoint you either, especially if you’ve ever felt out of place.

I live and teach creative writing in Florida where the bugs are large and the lizards are fast. When I’m not writing and reading, I’m watching tv and movies, even haunting the theater on a weekday afternoon to get my popcorn fix. I love weird sci-fi and all the scary movies. If you ask me, the scary summer movies are off to a great start with Obsession and Backrooms, but hey, have you seen this old sci-fi thriller (from 2001) or this even older movie (from 1979)?