Summary
Winner of the 2023 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers and finalist for the 2023 Astounding Award for Best New Writer Naseem Jamnia (they/them) writes inclusive speculative fiction for adults, teens, and kids. Their debut novella The Bruising of Qilwa (Tachyon Publications 2022), which introduces their queernormative Persian-inspired secondary world, was a finalist for the IAFA Crawford, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. Kirkus called their queer middle-grade debut The Glade (Aladdin 2025), starring neurodivergent, racialized tweens "a scary good time that expands the middle-grade horror canon."
In addition to appearing in The Sunday Morning Transport, their work has been anthologized in The White Guy Dies First: 13 Scary Stories of Fear and Power (Tor Teen 2024; reimagining body horror from a trans perspective), Iran+100: Stories From a Century After the Coup (Comma Press 2025; retelling the tragedy at Cinema Rex), and We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books 2024; about grandparent memory loss).
They were the 2018 Bitch Media Fellow in Technology, a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow, a 2023 Otherwise Fellow, and the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellow. Their nonfiction has been published in The Rumpus, New Orleans Review, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Bitch Media, and other venues. They co-wrote Positive Interactions with At-Risk Children: Enhancing Students’ Wellbeing, Resilience, and Success (Routledge 2019) with Dr. Mojdeh Bayat.
Naseem is the managing editor and book designer for Sword & Kettle Press, a tiny publishing house of inclusive speculative fiction, and formerly the managing editor of the gaming criticism website Sidequest.Zone. They cofounded and run the Reno-based Heretics' Workshop, a radical community-oriented craft-based workshop series hosted by local bookstore The Radical Cat. They teach inclusive speculative fiction and cultural craft through organizations such as Tin House, Clarion West, Roots. Wounds. Words., the Carl Brandon Society, and others, and are currently on the faculty for the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe's low-residency creative writing MFA. Naseem is also one of the founders of Freedom to Read Nevada and the Nevada chapter co-lead for Authors Against Book Bans.
A Persian-Chicagoan, child of Iranian immigrants, and former neuroscientist, Naseem lives outside of Reno, Nevada, with their geologist husband and four furred creatures.
Education
- MFA, Creative Writing, University of Nevada, Reno
- M.S., Biological Sciences with distinction, DePaul University
- A.B., Biological Sciences, English and Creative Writing, University of Chicago