“This Muslim community, but also other minority writers…people are there to empathize and sympathize and boost each other.” “I don’t know if I’d have kept writing if I didn’t have this community,” she says. For Ali, that place is a community of writers. Her characters navigate school, family, relationships and religion, finding their places in the world. Building a communityĪli writes about community, among other things. So for her next novel, Love from A to Z Ali focused on the positive, hoping to allow young readers to see themselves in her story, and to relate to the positive experiences of her characters in a Muslim community. But I noticed that young readers really wanted those stories rooted in their own Muslim backgrounds.”

“For white readers and dominant groups, they see the stories that just let them be, and feel comfortable with the way they live their lives. “We as Muslims never had our foundational books,” Ali explains. Saints and Misfits quickly garnered widespread praise, earning its place on a dozen reading lists, grants, and awards around the country.īut following this successful debut, Ali decided to look at topics outside of intra-community ones for her next book, citing a certain “fatigue” of heavy literary topics within marginalized communities. This debut novel followed the story of Janna Yusuf, a teenaged Muslim girl living in the United States, navigating crushes, expectations, religion, and an attempted sexual assault by a well-known and respected boy in her community.

Saints and misfits by sk ali