

The Voice of Hena Khan: Navigating Culture Through Stories

In her writing, she works really hard to have even shy and intimidated characters have agency. In fact, she learned the hard way in her first middle grade novel that pre-teens need to have agency in their own life in order for other potential kids as an audience to cheer them on.
When asked about her writing experiences, she said that she enjoys writing chapter series like the Zayd and Zara series the most because they very much reflect her real-life experiences, and she can most easily write about her family and community. She is also enjoying a format new to her, the graphic novel. She finds picture books the most challenging with the difficulty in having so few words to mess up with.

She has written two series that are woven together, the Zayd and the Zara books. Even in the Zayd books that are sports focused books for younger readers, there is a lot of culture, friendship and emotion woven in. The Zara books have particularly spunky female protagonists.
Critical Hena’s life and therefore in her books are mentors. Although she didn’t find them until later in her career, she finds others in her artistic community provide joy and support and she wanted to have the young people in her novels find this earlier in their lives.



She wrote a two-book series, the Amina series, so that she could include music as a way to show the diversity and range of perspectives of the two billion Muslims alive today.
She also used these books to show her characters having to cope with the challenges of having both Pakistani and American identities, which is often the case of children of immigrants. However, she makes sure that her characters are unapologetic and not self-loathing around their identities or their parents’ immigration statuses. In this way she lifts up the kids who share her background and encourages their friends to think that their background is cool.



She and her colleague Tarek Elgawhary compiled Islamic quotes and writing prompts for The Daily Contemplations Journal in order to show the beauty and universality of Islam (I have to say, I have a lot of experience with writing prompt journals, and this is the best I’ve seen). They provide writing prompts from the Quaran, quotes from poets, mystics and scholars, and the Hadith among others. Themes include self-reflection, controlling your tongue, role of nature in your life, forgiveness, gratitude, etc.
Hena has a lot of work on the front burner from new books in the Zayd series, to a graphic novel, to a picture book.
When asked what she would tell her 10-year-old self she said she would tell her, that if she has a story to tell, tell it and that she is a writer if she writes.
She would tell budding writers that they just need to put in the work and write.
I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation with Hena and hope you find her as interesting, informative and fun as I did.