by Carmen Van Kerckhove

I’m excited to announce that starting next week, Fatemeh Fakhraie will be joining Latoya Peterson and Wendi Muse as a special correspondent for Racialicious!

She’ll be writing one post every other week for the blog, and will also be helping me with some odds and ends behind the scenes. Here’s more about her:

Fatemeh Fakhraie was born in the U.S. She is currently finishing her master’s thesis and running Muslima Media Watch, a blog that analyzes the appearance of Muslim women in the media and popular culture.

Influenced by the lack of images about her ethnic and religious identities, Fatemeh studied mass media communications for her undergraduate degree. “The media is an incredibly powerful tool; I like the idea that I can positively influence the way someone thinks about my cultures by having a voice within the media,” she says.

Through her blog and her future career (God willing), she hopes to foster new ways of looking at Middle Eastern cultures and religions, and normalizing them in mainstream Western society.