Tala Khanmalek

Tala Khanmalek (she/they) is a writer, scholar, educator, and oral historian. She publishes creative and academic prose and frequently co-authors work in both genres with heidi andrea restrepo rhodes. She and heidi were recently awarded a 2023 Creative Capital Award to complete their co-authored book project, Vital Signs. Tala was a 2022 Periplus Fellowship finalist, a 2021 Anaphora Arts fellow, and a 2020 Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) fellow. At present, she is a mentee in the Radius of Arab American Writers’ SWANA mentorship program. Her writing is informed by archives, activist legacies, family history, and her own ongoing interviews with healing justice practitioners.

Tala is currently an assistant professor at California State University Fullerton and a (virtual) visiting scholar at Duke University. She was previously a postdoctoral associate at Princeton University, a lecturer at California State University Los Angeles, and a visitor at UC Santa Cruz. Tala earned a PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a BA in Ethnic Studies and French, also at UC Berkeley. She is now a member of the American Studies Association’s Critical Ethnic Studies Committee. 

Tala is a co-organizer of the symposium, “Then You Don’t Want Me”: Canonizing Gayl Jones, and other projects-in-progress on writer Gayl Jones. She values opportunities for discussing the writing process, most recently in Monica Huerta's “Personal Limits” series with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and blogs regularly for Ideas on Fire about writing and working in higher education. Her creative nonfiction is featured in the latest episode of the podcast “It’s Lit with PhDJ.” 

Last but not least, Tala is a trained birthworker and the creator of Sailing for Social Justice, a former sponsored project of the Detroit-based Allied Media Projects, which you can learn more about from this interview.