Zakiya N. Jamal is an American bi writer and journalist. She was born in Queens, raised on Long Island, and currently lives in Brooklyn. In other words, like she likes to say, she is a New Yorker who writes about New Yorkers.
Zakiya N. Jamal earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Georgetown University and an MFA in Creative Writing, specialising in Writing for Children and Young Adults, from The New School. Her work has appeared in publications including BuzzFeed, People.com, Romper, and Thought Catalogue. Her nonfiction essay exploring “Cuban Impostor Syndrome” was featured in the anthology Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed.
She is the author of the bi romantic comedy Sparks Fly, which centers on the relationship between two black bi people in modern-day New York. Zakiya N. Jamal announced the book deal for Sparks Fly on Instagram, describing it as a “smutty Bi4Bi Black romance,” meaning that she promoted it as a bi romantic comedy even before it was published.
She also wrote the sapphic young adult romance If We Were a Movie and the upcoming queer rom-com Two Can Play That Game. She often writes about queer people, particularly bi characters.
She identifies as bi and queer. As she told Catapult Magazine, she was raised in a religious family and a homophobic community; it took her time to realise that she is bi.
This is how she described her orientation in a guest article for Unleashing Readers:
I am queer. If I were to put a more specific label on myself, I’d say I’m bisexual. I believe I have always been this way, but I didn’t realise it until around 2019 when I met someone who was not a cisgender guy and started crushing on them. Hard. But even though I’d made this discovery about myself, it still took me some time before I was able to say it out loud. Whether it was internalised homophobia or a general shame about my identity, I found it difficult to find the words.
She has also pointed out that learning about coming-out stories of other bi authors, as well as representation of queer and bi people in media, helped her realise that she is bi.
She uses the hashtag #OwnVoices to promote her queer and bi stories. She has also said that she wants to be the kind of supportive author who helps other bi and queer readers accept themselves. Additionally, she has spoken against queerbaiting — when authors or filmmakers heavily imply that a character is bi or queer without clearly confirming it — and has expressed a preference for explicit representation that helps queer and bi readers see themselves in stories; this is exactly what her writing is about.