About

Natasha Hakimi Zapata is an award-winning journalist, university lecturer, and literary translator based in London, U.K. She was born in Chicago to a Mexican mother and Iranian father and raised in Mexico City and Los Angeles. Her work appears regularly in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, In These Times, Truthdig, Los Angeles Magazine, and elsewhere, and her nonfiction book ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE: Lessons for America From Around the Globe is forthcoming from The New Press in February, 2025.

For her journalism and literary criticism, she has received six Southern California Journalism Awards for her work as a foreign correspondent and three National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards for her literary criticism. She has also received several awards for creative writing, including the May Merrill Miller Award for Poetry, the Ruth Brill Award for short fiction, the Falling Leaves Award, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and was a semifinalist for the Dzanc Books/ Guernica International Literary Award.

Hakimi Zapata has been a lecturer at Boston University and is currently teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the former Foreign Editor of the Webby Award-winning site Truthdig, where she worked for a decade, and has also worked at Los Angeles Magazine and the renowned literary journal AGNI. The writer holds a Creative Writing M.F.A. from Boston University and both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles. In college she received scholarships from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Smithsonian Latino Center and the UCLA Alumni Association.

In 2014 she collaborated on the The Transborder Immigrant Tool Book published by the University of Michigan Press and in 2016 Literal Publishing released full-length bilingual editions of her translations of Alicia Borinsky's My Husband's Woman and Liliana Lukin's Theater of Operations.

Follow her on Instagram at @natashahakimizapata, Twitter/X at @natashakimiz , or Facebook.