Arshia Simkin is a graduate of North Carolina State University’s MFA, one of the country’s top-ranked graduate writing programs. Her writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, Narrative, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Prior to attending NC State’s MFA program, she was a staff attorney at a legal aid firm in upstate New York, where she represented survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. During her time at NC State, she taught three undergraduate creative writing classes and instructed high schoolers at the Young Writers Workshop in Raleigh.

Of her interests in writing, Arshia says: “I moved from Pakistan to the United States when I was six years old, and I write stories populated by the people I grew up with: taxi cab drivers, convenience store clerks, stay- at-home mothers, people on disability, aunts, uncles, cousins, the women forced into arranged marriages—the whole constellation of poor immigrants that are usually ignored. I also write stories about the Western world I’ve grown up in and whose ideals I’ve simultaneously embraced and rejected: stories about obsessive teenage friendships, about loneliness on a college campus flooded with protest, about women who are subjected to emotional abuse by their husbands. There is overlap between these stories: I am always examining what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated society; what it is means to be an outsider, in whatever capacity; and what it means to yearn desperately for moments of connection.”

 Some recent books that Arshia loved include: Leila Slimani’s  The Perfect Nanny (Chanson douce), Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Geir Gulliksen’s The Story of a Marriage, Tessa Hadley’s Bad Dreams and Other Stories, Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, and Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs.

 Some of her all-time favorites are: Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and anything by Ottessa Moshfegh, Elena Ferrante, and Lauren Groff.

Sign up for Arshia’s classes if you are interested in: literary fiction, contemporary realist fiction, immigrant narratives, short stories, female-centric narratives, fairy tales, flash fiction, and psychological thrillers.