SOFIA ALI-KHAN

Sofia Ali-Khan is the author of A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America, published by Random House in July 2022.  She is a social justice lawyer turned writer/storyteller in the anti-racist and human rights spaces. She has appeared on The Moth's Mainstages in Boston and Philadelphia and more recently at the Manhattan Public Theater for the House of Speakeasy. Her writing at the intersection of politics, race, history, and Muslim America has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the Sarasota Herald Tribune, among other publications.  In 2022, she earned a Pushcart Prize nomination for an essay appearing in the journal Farmer-ish. 

As a lawyer, she has worked for Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, Prairie State Legal Services in Illinois, and the American Bar Association. Sofia became a national leader on the right to language access, developing and writing the detailed grant that resulted in the ABA's Standards for Language Access in Courts and creating the policies, protocols and trainings for language access across an eleven office legal services agency. She also practiced in the areas of welfare law, immigration, housing, community economic development, and Medicaid access, founding an offsite legal clinic for undocumented workers with health emergencies. She was a founding board member and activist with the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and has spoken to dozens of academic, interfaith, radio and television audiences on aspects of Islamic faith and history.  During the Trump campaign and presidency, she drafted and helped to implement municipal sanctuary policies.

She now lives in Ontario, Canada with her family on the traditional and rightful territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and is at work on her first novel.