Rozina Ali

National Fellow, 2024

Rozina Ali, National Fellow, is a journalist whose work focuses on the Middle East and South Asia, the War on Terror, immigration, and Islamophobia. Ali also writes about literature and poetry. She is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, and was previously on the editorial staff at the New Yorker and a senior editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, based in Egypt. In 2022–2023, she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, the Nation, and Harper’s, among other outlets. She is the winner of the 2023 National Magazine Award in reporting.

Ali is currently writing a book about the recent history of Islamophobia in the United States.

Selected Work

  • How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?: An article from the New York Times Magazine about the U.S. Marine who kidnapped a baby girl orphaned in Afghanistan, and her family’s fight to get her back.
  • The Afghan Women Left Behind: A piece for the New Yorker on the events following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, in which a U.S. organization shut down the country’s largest network of women’s shelters.
  • The ‘Herald Square Bomber’ Who Wasn’t: An article for the New York Times Magazine telling the story of a young Muslim man in New York who was entrapped by an NYPD informant, and sent to jail for thirty years.
  • Lawful Carnage: An essay review for the American Prospect about two recent books that take stock of the U.S. War on Terror.
Featured Work