Humera Afridi

HUMERA AFRIDI (1971– ) is a New York-based writer of Pakistani origin. She was born in Lahore, spent her early years in Karachi, and left Pakistan at twelve with her parents for the United Arab Emirates. She earned her degrees in the United States at Mount Holyoke College and Carnegie Mellon University, and was the recipient of a New York Times Fellowship at New York University where she earned an MFA in creative writing. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and several anthologies, including Leaving Home (Oxford University Press, 2001), 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11 (NYU Press, 2003), and Shattering the Stereotypes (Olive Branch, 2005). Currently, she is finishing her first novel and teaching at Western Connecticut State University.

She says that she “endeavors to capture the dissonance that arises from the incommensurable worlds” her characters inhabit. As a woman belonging to the Pathan Afridi tribe, she carries with her the consciousness that she, “a northern Pakistani tribal outcaste walks the streets of New York” while her ancestral home on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan is often described as the “world's most dangerous place.”