Position(s): Statement Deputy Editor Winter (2023), MiC Assistant Editor (2022), MiC Columnist (2020-2021)
Section(s): Statement, Michigan in Color
Semesters at The Daily: 7
“Maybe our words leave them floating, trailing a bit behind the understanding that we’ve concretized with our story, their relating wounds now open, and with a realization that still there is not a safe place to land, that even putting language to trauma is not the end of it for any one of us,” this is from the foreword of my essay “To Restitute,” which was published so many years ago. I think about this often, how writing for a place like The Daily or anywhere for that matter, has the potential to remake us, to help us reconcile with and rebuild what the world has so violently taken from us but also how it has the potential to break us in ways we never thought possible.
I joined The Michigan Daily in August of 2020. I concluded much of my work in April of 2023. There are so many people to thank for helping me define myself and everything that came after.
Maya Mokh, thank you for hiring me as a columnist for Michigan in Color my freshman year of college. You exemplified everything a space like Michigan in Color should be. Lora Faraj, thank you for being my first-ever editor. You were the first person to ever call me a good writer. Michigan in Color gave me the greatest wealth of creative freedom I have ever had and I would have endured anything to keep it all alive. Yasmine Slimani, you are one of my favorite writers always and I think about “What the mess means” every day. Safura, Hugo, Jessica and everyone who drifted in and out of Tuesday editing shifts, thank you for listening to me talk about full moons and Montana and which stories I thought would win the Pulitzer Prize that year and which stories I thought had changed my life. How lovely it was to be surrounded by people who knew what it meant to write and truly feel ALIVE.
Taylor Schott, thank you for giving me the greatest privilege of editing The Statement. What a lovely shining gem of a section. I had the sweetest time. Reese, John, and Jeremy, you were all so wonderful to work with. Our Origins Edition was a literary delight. Thank you for listening to me talk about that one amazingly profound episode of This American Life I had heard that week even though they were all amazingly profound and my cat Aziz and the joys of peer-reviewed data and for coming to my collage night. To my writers, I learned so much from reading your work. Olivia, I loved every single time you wrote about Armenia. Sammy, I loved coming up with the million and one ideas for the stories you and I would one day write together. We will write them all.
Martha Lewand, we are friends because of one email and one story. Your work for News was astounding and it shaped mine. You get what it truly means to work at a place like The Daily. Thank you.
Jonathan Vaughn, thank you for letting me tell your story. It helped me heal in more ways than you could ever possibly know.
To my professor Ruby Tapia, thank you for helping me put together “To Restitute” — it would not exist without Narratives of Girlhood and your foreword. You were my defining professor. Everyone has one.
To my mother and father and my friends Atiya, Siri, Alyssa, Ellie, Jordan, Lynne, Dana, Regina, Maria, Nicole, Elana, Megan, Olivia, Klara, Sammy and Martha too, and everyone else, thank you for listening to me complain about The Daily. And despite it, thank you for always reading everything I’ve written for The Daily. You so deeply understood that I must write to survive.
To The Daily, thank you for giving me back the voice that was taken from me so many years ago. I will spend the rest of my life trying to help others find theirs too.
To my grandmother, I miss you so much. I so desperately wish you could have seen all that I have become.