About
Arshia Simkin was born in Pakistan and spent the first six years of her life there.
She grew up near Washington, D.C. and she currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband. She is a graduate of the North Carolina State University MFA program in creative writing and the co-founder of the Redbud Writing Project, a creative writing organization that teaches workshops in the Triangle. Prior to attending NC State, Arshia was a legal aid attorney in upstate New York representing survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault in civil matters.
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 a outsider, in whatever capacity; and what it means to yearn desperately for moments of connection.”