Susan Muaddi Darraj

In 2020, Muaddi Darraj published a children's book series, Farah Rocks, about a Palestinian American girl named Farah Hajjar. The series, which is the first in North America to feature a Palestinian American or Arab American protagonist, earned a starred book review by the School Library Journal, which said, "Farah is a well-rounded character with ambitions and struggles; readers will identify with her challenges and root for her to succeed. A first purchase for upper elementary readers." The series has received much praise for its groundbreaking portrayal of a happy, healthy and well-adjusted child of Arab immigrants, which contradicts the usual "crisis plot" in which children of color are cast.

In 2019, Muaddi Darraj launched the #TweetYourThobe social media campaign to promote Palestinian culture and the congressional campaign of Rashida Tlaib. The campaign went viral and garnered much attention for Palestinian women's artwork and Palestinian culture. #TweetYourThobe was covered widely by CNN, The New York Times, Forbes Magazine, Business Insider, NPR, Public Radio International, and other venues. Muaddi Darraj later wrote an essay about how a poem by Langston Hughes inspired her to think of the idea.

She is best known for her short story collection, A Curious Land, which won an American Book Award in 2016 and the AWP Grace Paley Prize. The stories are closely linked together, a style known as a mosaic novel. A Curious Land follows the inhabitants of a fictional Palestinian West Bank village, Tel al-Hilou ("the pretty hilltop") and traces their intertwined lives from the era of the Ottoman Empire through the first Intifada. Spanning almost a century, the stories are mostly love stories, set amidst turbulent times. Booklist said, "Darraj writes traditional, tragic love stories set among Orthodox Palestinians during periods of historical unrest. A superb collection and a perfect selection for public libraries." A Curious Land was also shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award.

Muaddi Darraj's first work of fiction, The Inheritance of Exile, was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2008. It has been compared to Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club because of its structure: it offers several, intertwined stories narrated by Palestinian American women, as well as stories narrated by their immigrant mothers. The book is set in the working-class neighborhood of South Philadelphia, and its characters grapple with the intersectional identities.

She edited Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing , which was published in 2004 by Praeger Publishers. With Waïl Hassan, she co-edited a volume for the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series on Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. She has also contributed book chapters to several anthologies and collections, including Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction and Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism.

Susan Muaddi Darraj (born May 11, 1975) is a Palestinian American writer. Born in Philadelphia to Palestinian immigrant parents, she attended Rutgers University - Camden, NJ, where she earned a master's degree in English Literature. She has authored several collections of fiction, young adult and children's books, as well as academic and personal essays and articles. Muaddi Darraj is a tenured professor of English Literature at Harford Community College as well as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Baltimore, MD.