Melody Moezzi is a writer, speaker, attorney, activist, and award-winning author. Her latest book is The Rumi Prescription: How an Ancient Mystic Poet Changed My Modern Manic Life, (TarcherPerigee/Penguin), for which she won a 2021 Wilbur Award. Her other books include the critically acclaimed memoir Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life (Avery/Penguin) and War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims (University of Arkansas Press), which earned her a Georgia Author of the Year Award and a Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Honorable Mention. She has also contributed to various anthologies, including Love Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women and Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South.
Moezzi's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, the Oxford American, The American Scholar, NBC News, Inside Higher Ed, Al Arabiya, The South China Morning Post, Hürriyet, The Straits Times, Parabola and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, among many other outlets. Moezzi is also a United Nations Global Expert and an Opinion Leader for the British Council's Our Shared Future initiative. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, NPR, HLN, PBS, CSPAN, PRI, Air America and many other radio and television programs, providing commentary on issues ranging from mental health to Iran to feminism to Islam in America and beyond.
She has worked as a visiting associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she taught creative writing for six years before moving to Florida. She has also worked as the Executive Director of the non-profit interfaith organization 100 People of Faith and a corporate and non-profit consultant and attorney. In addition, she has worked as an investigator with the US Department of Homeland Security reporting to the US Congressional Commission on International Religious Freedom and as an intern covering health and human rights for The Carter Center. Other former occupations include waitress, cigar store clerk, fudge confectioner, gift shop attendant, jewelry store clerk, barista, and estate lawyer.
Moezzi is an experienced keynote speaker on a variety of issues—most notably around mental health, inclusion, writing, activism, disability rights, and Islam in America. Moezzi is a graduate of Wesleyan University (BA), the Emory University School of Law (JD), and the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health (MPH). She lives in Tallahassee with her husband, Matthew, and their ungrateful cats, Keshmesh and Nazanin. You can follow her work on her website and stay in touch by signing up for her newsletter here.
Below is a small sampling of Moezzi’s writing, the first of which explains why you won’t find her on social media: