Seema Yasmin

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor and poet. She writes across genres and has won poetry contests, narrative non-fiction awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in 2017 for breaking news reporting. She loves to write, period.

Seema trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and worked as a hospital doctor before moving to the U.S. to serve as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service. As a disease detective, she hunted viruses and other pathogens across American Indian reservations and inside prisons. Then she pursued her love for telling stories and studied journalism.

Her first book, The Impatient Dr. Lange, is a biography of her mentor, an AIDS scientist who believed he was close to finding a cure for HIV. He was killed on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014 when it was shot out of the sky by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. Her second book, Viral BS (Johns Hopkins University Press), dissects pseudoscience and medical myths and explores why health misinformation and disinformation spreads faster than microbes. Her debut project for young adults, What the Fact?!: Finding the Truth in All the Noise (Simon & Schuster), guides teens to navigate news in our fast-moving media landscape, and has already garnered two starred reviews.

Her first collaboration with Full Circle Literary colleague illustrator Fahmida Azim, was the award-winning Muslim Women Are Everything: Stereotype-Shattering Stories of Courage, Inspiration and Adventure (HarperDesign). Seema and Fahmida Azim are launching their latest collaboration in time for Halloween 2024: Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories from the Muslim World (Chronicle Books), which invites readers into the realm of supernatural spirits. Seema’s debut poetry collection If God Is A Virus, inspired by her reporting of the deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, was included in Haymarket’s BreakBeat Poets series, and was named one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2021.

Seema is co-author of two upcoming books: Under the Gun by Dr. Cedric Dark, which examines the gun crises from a healthcare perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) and Can Scientists Succeed Where Politicians Fail? by Nobel laureate Dr. Peter Agre which examines his life as a science diplomat.

Seema’s first picture book, The ABCs of Queer History (Workman Kids, 2024) is a joyous celebration of the lives and contributions of queer people across the ages, and her debut young adult novel, Unbecoming, will be out later this year, followed by a chapter book series with Salaam Reads/Simon + Schuster spotlighting compelling Muslim figures kids want to know..

Seema continues to teach at Stanford and UCLA, deliver keynotes around the world, and push the boundaries of what is possible for medicine, journalism, female empowerment and the written word.

Twitter @DoctorYasmin
Instagram @drseemayasmin

Reviews for Unbecoming:

“Yasmin leavens the story with sparkling humor and warmth. Laylah and Noor are the stars of the novel, but the well-rounded secondary characters are not far behind. This is a smart and beautifully written book, with a plot pulled from the front page of any newspaper.”
– Booklist, STARRED REVIEW

Reviews for What the Fact?!:

A savvy, accessible, and critical guide to media literacy.
– Kirkus Reviews starred review

Journalist Yasmin (If God Is a Virus, for adults) effectively explores contemporary media literacy’s barriers and how to overcome them in this eye-opening work told via contagion and vaccine metaphor.
– Publishers Weekly starred review