about
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. It has also been translated into Arabic by Arab Scientific Publishers. He also authored This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), which was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive magazine and was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. An anniversary edition of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?, which included a new afterword, was published in 2018.
An accomplished journalist, Bayoumi is also a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Nation, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The National, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Progressive, and many other places. His essay “Disco Inferno” was included in the collection Best Music Writing of 2006 (Da Capo). Bayoumi is also the co-editor (with Andrew Rubin) of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage), which has been reissued in an expanded edition as The Selected Works of Edward Said (1966-2006). He also edited Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: the Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict (O/R Books & Haymarket Books). With Lizzy Ratner, Bayoumi co-edited a special issue of The Nation magazine on Islamophobia (July 2-9, 2012). In 2017, he guest edited a special edition of the arts magazine Mizna, titled Surviving.
Bayoumi has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Sun-Times, and on CNN, FOX News, Book TV, National Public Radio, and many other media outlets from around the world. He delivered a TEDxCUNY talk, titled “Defeating Far Right Extremism,” in December 2020. Panel discussions on How Does It Feel To be Problem? have been convened at The Museum of the City of New York, PEN American Center, Drexel Law School, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the book has been chosen as the common reading for incoming freshmen at dozens of universities across the country. Bayoumi’s article “Journey to Guantánamo” was a finalist for the 2023 Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association’s Excellence in Reporting award, and he has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Award.
Bayoumi is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and is the recipient of two excellence in teaching awards. He also received a 2011 Culture and Achievement Award from the Network of Arab American Professionals and 2016 Pathmaker to Peace Award from the organization Brooklyn for Peace. In 2015, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Southern Vermont College. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
(Oh, and he tweeted the most re-tweeted tweet of the 2016 USA presidential debates. This one!)
Photo by Neville Elder (click here for hi-res image by Neville Elder or here for an alternative headshot by Yana Kuchirko).
