Seema Yasmin

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, standup comedian, and poet. A queer, Gujarati-Muslim writer and director, she is a fiction fellow of the Kundiman and Tin House workshops, and a playwright at Soho Theatre in London. She is the author of eight books for adults and children, including: Muslim Women Are Everything (HarperCollins, 2021), The ABCs of Queer History (Hachette, 2024), and the poetry collection, If God is a Virus (Haymarket, 2021). Her forthcoming titles include the picture book Inshallah, the middle grade series Muslim Mavericks, and the YA novel The Voices (all Simon and Schuster, 2026/27). Seema trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge, in journalism at the University of Toronto, and in clown at The Clown School in Los Angeles. She served as a disease detective in the U.S. government’s Epidemic Intelligence Service where she investigated outbreaks, and as a medical analyst for CNN from 2014-2021 where she reported on outbreaks of Ebola, Zika and Covid. She is director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University where she studies the spread of anti-science disinformation, and teaches storytelling. Seema is adapting her debut young adult novel, Unbecoming (Simon and Schuster, 2024), for the screen, and is at work on her second young adult novel which is a climate-djinn horror story. She lives in Las Vegas.