������

Air Dates: March 17-23, 2025

The birth of a child is typically associated with great joy. But for Samina Ali, the birth of her first child brought with it medical complications that nearly took her life.

Ali is an influential advocate and spokesperson for Muslim women’s rights worldwide, who has served as a cultural ambassador to several European countries for the U.S. State Department. She is also an award-winning author, influential activist for Muslim women’s rights, popular public speaker, and curator of the groundbreaking global exhibition Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices. She is a founding member of American Muslim feminist organization Daughters of Hajar. The group’s peaceful march into a mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, to advance equality became part of the documentary The Mosque in Morgantown, which aired nationwide on PBS as part of the series America at a Crossroads. She has been a regular columnist for the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and she has written for the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Child magazine. She has also been a consultant for iTVS and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Her debut novel, “Madras on Rainy Days,” was the winner of France’s prestigious Prix Premier Roman Étranger Award and a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction and the California Book Reviewers Award. Poets & Writers Magazine named it a Top Debut of the Year.

On this episode of “Story in the Public Square,” Ali discusses her new book, “Pieces You’ll Never Get Back,” where she tells the story of the complications she experienced as she gave birth to her son at 29 years old where she sustained mass global brain trauma that left her in a coma and took years to heal from.  She shares her perspective on grief, saying, “for me, empathy really required me to help people to understand that I may be talking about something that happened to me on this grand level, but each and every single one of us experience trauma and grief. And each of us go through seasons of darkness. And my hope through this book is not to call attention to something that I went through as trauma, but my hope is to show that we all have the resilience and we all have the power, and we all have the strength to pull through those dark seasons.”