Susan Muaddi Darraj is Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. She is also a Lecturer in the Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program and the Senior Editor of The Baltimore Review .
Her short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile , was a finalist in the 2003 AWP Book Awards for Short , a finalist for the John Gardener Fiction Award, and named Book of the Year (Short Fiction) by ForeWord Magazine. The collection was published in 2007 by University of Notre Dame Press.
She edited Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing , which was published in 2004 by Praeger Publishers. Her other books include young adult biographies of Queen Noor, Indira Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, among others, for Chelsea House Publishers. She is currently co-editing, with Wail Hassan, a volume for the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series on Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Stories, The Orchid Literary Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, City Paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Al-Jadid, Baltimore Magazine (Metroguide), Pages Magazine, Sojourner, Calyx, Urbanite, and other forums. She has also contributed book chapters to several anthologies and collections. She is co-founder (along with the editors of The Potomac Review and Barrelhouse) of the annual conference, Conversations & Connections: Practical Advice on Getting Published and speaks often at conferences on topics ranging from Arab-American literature to creative writing to pedagogy.
She belongs to the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Radius of Arab-American Writers (RAWI), the Associated Writing Programs (AWP), the Community College Humanities Association (CCHA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), MESA (the Middle East Studies Association), and the Modern Language Association (MLA).
