Author

Storyteller

Artist

Sofia Ali-Khan is the author of A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America (Random House, 2022), winner of the 2023 Nautilus Gold Book Award.  

A Good Country is a braided narrative, both memoir and the history of how American segregation is maintained through the forced migration and dispossession of Black and Brown people. Complete endnotes for A Good Country can be found here.

Award-Winning Author

Sofia Ali-Khan
““In this captivating portrait of America, Sofia Ali-Khan makes the case that a ‘good country,’ as her immigrant parents would call their new home, should be strong enough to confront its past.

At a time when many would rather ban or bury the truth, Ali-Khan bravely faces it in this bracing and necessary book.”

”
— Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies

Storyteller

Sofia crafts custom stories for nonprofit organizations, corporations, and community audiences about race, colonialism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and social justice. Her stories ground your efforts to create a better society.

Writing at the intersection of politics, race, history, and Muslim America, Sofia’s essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications, earning a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2022. She has been a featured storyteller on The Moth’s MainStage in Boston and Philadelphia and the Manhattan Public Theater in NYC.

Artist   

Sofia's ceramic sculptures and installations are an expression of ecstatic Muslim faith and the vast traditions of Islamic art and architecture. They range from small, personal pieces which can be customized for commission to larger installations, all hand-built or thrown and one-of-a-kind.

Articles, Essays, Stories

Featured
It's An Inhumane Time for the US to Demonize Pakistan
It's An Inhumane Time for the US to Demonize Pakistan

When President Joe Biden called Pakistan “one of the most dangerous nations in the world,” the irony felt painful. For so many Muslims in America and around the globe, the United States has spent the last two decades proving itself to us to be the most dangerous nation in the world.

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Tiny Love Story: Our Independence
Tiny Love Story: Our Independence

The last time my family watched July 4 fireworks, we spread a blanket out in Washington Crossing Park, the site of George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. Our little ones, then 4 and 6, stayed up far past bedtime. That was when Donald Trump was campaigning on the promise of banning people trying to enter the U.S. from Muslim-majority countries.

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Finding the American Dream in Canada
Finding the American Dream in Canada

Recent studies and surveys by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) tell us our concerns were justified. ISPU has been a boon to American Muslims, who had previously lacked good data about themselves, helping us see more clearly how we’re faring.

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I moved to Canada in the Trump era. But I still yearn for an America that lives up to the dream.
I moved to Canada in the Trump era. But I still yearn for an America that lives up to the dream.

What I couldn’t have known then, in the absence of a curriculum that teaches history in chronological order, with competing narratives of both victors and victims, is that my tiny slice of America was constructed atop the worst excesses of a more than 400-year legacy of European colonization. Because American schoolchildren are, as I was, so often encouraged to substitute slogans like “manifest destiny” and “nation of immigrants” for actual history, I could not yet make sense of the troublesome gaps between these slogans and the world around me.

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Sofia Ali-Khan rediscovers her faith after her life falls apart.

Sofia Ali-Khan shares stories of “slippery” liberty and how they compelled her to move to Canada.