Biography

I was born in California, grew up in Rome, lived in Paris, and moved to Cairo in 2002.

I’ve been a freelance writer in the region ever since. I worked at the local independent magazine the Cairo Times and was the culture editor of Cairo magazine in 2005-2006 and a special projects editor at Mada Masr in 2013-2014. I also edited and wrote for The Arabist blog.

I reported from Egypt for many years for the BBC-PRI radio program The World, and covered the Arab Spring for Newsweek, The New York Times, The New Yorker online and the London Review of Books. From 2011 to 2014, I was the Chronicle of Higher Education's Middle East correspondent.

I studied comparative literature at Stanford University, have a masters in Near East Studies from NYU (with a focus on modern Egyptian literature), and am a graduate of the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad. I speak Arabic, French and Italian.

From 2014 to 2019, I lived in Rabat, Morocco, where I ran a study-abroad program in journalism.

Today I live in Amman, Jordan with my husband Issandr El Amrani and our son. I co-host the BULAQ podcast (on Arabic literature in translation) and am a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.