Short Bio: Amira writes fiction and essays. She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she specializes in working with International students. She was born in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, and lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with her husband, Lee, and their dog, Sharpie.
Long Bio: Amira got her Master of Fine Arts in Writing Fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011. During her time at VCU, she served as the First Novel Award Fellow, taught expository and creative writing, and worked in the National Scholarship Office. For eleven years, she has been a full-time language lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she specializes in working with International students and their instructors, and has designed and taught two freshman seminars: Human Stories of the War on Terror and Betwixt and Between: Liminality in Individual and Collective Experience. She spent Spring 2019 teaching at NYU-Shanghai as part of a departmental exchange, and summer 2019 took her to Spain, with the support of a grant from NYU's Global Research Initiative to work on a project called "Reading the Quran in Madrid,” which turned into, “Reading the Quran during Covid.” She writes fiction and nonfiction with hopes of finding beauty through brokenness. She has served as a literacy volunteer with the Program for Survivors of Torture and the Arab-American Family Support Center and a writing mentor for Girls Write Now, and she is a founding member of Inner Fields Sangha. She loves biking through the liminal space between Ridgewood, Queens and Bushwick, Brooklyn where she lives with her husband, Lee Cohen, and their dog Sharpie. She was born in Beirut, Lebanon.