Minelle Mahtani is Associate Professor, Department of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, University of British Columbia. She is the author of “Mixed Race Amnesia” and one of the editors of “Global Mixed Race.” She is the former host of “Sense of Place” at Roundhouse Radio, 98.3 Vancouver. The show won several awards, including a Canadian Ethnic Media Association award and a British Columbia Association of Broadcasters award. She is a Muslim woman of South-Asian and Iranian descent. Minelle is also a former national television news journalist at the CBC. Her work has appeared in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, Rigorous and forthcoming in Carte Blanche.
Minelle is working on a memoir about silences and voice: what it meant for her to build a career in radio when her Muslim-Iranian mother was losing her voice as she struggled with tongue cancer. It explores the experience of sharing stories of BIPOC people while watching the stories of her ancestors get buried in her mother’s mouth. It is about the toxic repetition of repressing those burgeoning silences, and the damage that silence does to one’s body.
Minelle is represented by Stephanie Sinclair.