Staff

Cynthia Dewi Oka

editor-in-chief

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the editor-in-chief of Adi. Originally from Bali, Indonesia, she is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For 15 years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for justice that center the experiences of the global majority. She lives in Los Angeles.

Nimmi Gowrinathan

founder & publisher

Nimmi Gowrinathan is the publisher of Adi Magazine and a writer, scholar, and activist. She is a professor at the City College of New York, where she founded the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative. She has been an analyst and policy consultant on women’s political voice and participation in violence in South Asia. She provides expert analysis for CNN, MSNBC, AL Jazeera, and the BBC and has been published in Harper’s, Freeman’s, and Guernica, where she is the creator of the Female Fighter Series.

Genevieve Hartman

social media & outreach coordinator

Genevieve Hartman is a Korean American writer based in upstate New York. She is the Social Media & Outreach Coordinator for Adi Magazine and publicist for Alice James Books. Her poems and reviews have been published in The Rumpus, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Singapore Unbound, River Mouth Review, and others.

Jori Lewis

senior editor

Jori Lewis writes about the environment and agriculture mostly from the Global South. In 2018, she received the prestigious Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction to complete her book, Slaves for Peanuts. She is also the senior editor of Adi Magazine, a literary magazine covering global politics. Jori Lewis splits her time between Illinois and Dakar, Senegal.

Board

Meara Sharma

Meara Sharma served as founding editor-in-chief of Adi from 2019-2022. Her work, which often explores ecology, belief systems, and cultural memory, has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Vice, Frieze, National Public Radio, BBC Radio 4, and elsewhere. She has been a senior editor for Guernica, a magazine of global arts and politics, and a fellow with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Raised in Massachusetts, she currently lives in London.

Michael Shaikh

Michael Shaikh is a writer and human rights activist based in New York City. Most recently, Michael was the Deputy Director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability in New York City, where he focused on embedding human rights principles into the city’s climate change projects. Before joining the Mayor’s Office in 2015, Michael led the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights investigations into the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. He is currently a volunteer cook at CHiPS, a soup kitchen and women’s shelter in Brooklyn, and is working on a project looking at how political violence changes food culture.

Asale Angel-Ajani

Asale Angel-Ajani is a professor and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at City University of New York, City College. She has worked with refugees and incarcerated people all over the world and has contributed to reports for the International Organization for Migration, Africa Watch (Human Rights Watch), UNESCO and UNHCR, among several other NGOs. As an activist, Asale founded Texas Prison Watch and was an early member of Critical Resistance and Women Care Harlem, NYC. Asale is the author of Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade, which was named by Carte Blanche as the best nonfiction book of 2010.

Jina Moore Ngarambe

Jina Moore Ngarambe has reported from more than 30 countries around the world, for magazines, newspapers and radio. Based for the last decade in East Africa, she has been the East Africa Bureau Chief for the New York Times, the inaugural Global Women’s Rights reporter for BuzzFeed News, and, as an independent journalist, a contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, and BBC’s The World. For her groundbreaking reporting from Liberia on Ebola, she was shortlisted as International Journalist of the Year by the ONE Media Awards, among Britain’s top journalism honors. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Guernica Magazine.

Michael Archer

senior editorial advisor

Michael Archer is the founder of Guernica magazine, where he was editor-in-chief from 2004 through 2016, and currently serves as chief editorial advisor. He is the recipient of the 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing, given to “a magazine editor whose high literary standards have contributed significantly to the excellence of the publication he or she edits.” His fiction, nonfiction, and commentary have appeared in numerous online and print publications.

Dipali Mukhopadhyay

Dipali Mukhopadhyay is an Associate Professor (untenured) of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She is the author of Warlords, Strongman Governors and State Building in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Her policy-oriented writing has been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Foreign Policy, Lawfare, the US Institute of Peace, and the Washington Post. Her work has also been cited in The Economist and The New York Times. She is Vice President of the American Institute of Afghan Studies and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Fanta Toure-Puri

Fanta Toure-Puri is the inaugural Director of the Girls First Fund. Prior to joining the Girls First Fund, Fanta worked at the World bank in the Human development department. Her work focused on productive social safety nets (cash-based interventions to reduce poverty and improve human development outcomes), social assistance delivery systems youth employment, early childhood development, livelihood support, and post-conflict stabilization. She holds a MA in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University and a BA in International and Public Relations from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Rafia Zakaria

Rafia Zakaria is the author of Against White Feminism (W. W. Norton/Hamish Hamilton 2021), Veil (2017), and The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (2015). She is a regular contributor to CNN and a columnist for The Baffler and Dawn (Pakistan). Rafia is represented by Sarah Bolling at The Gernert Company.

Issues