Abeer's Bio

For a more tender appreciation of Western Pennsylvania and its football addled residents, you can visit my little brother, Maher's website: jollybengali.net. Maher works for PNC Bank as an IT consultant and lives in Pittsburgh. My younger sister, Simi, did her Ph.D. in architecture at UC Berkeley while simultaneously teaching at MIT (rockstar) and working for an environmental engineering and architecture firm. She rents a cutie flat in Somerville with her partner, Ezra, who is an atmospheric scientist. My parents live in Pittsburgh where my father is a retired geology professor and my mother is a teacher of computers and economics.

I consider Philadelphia my first real home in the US as I spent the decade after high school in that vastly underrated city. I did business undergrad and grad school there and also worked and played frisbee and danced and biked all over town. However, San Francisco, where I lived from 2001-2005 and did my writing degree, is my favourite city in the US, maybe in the world.

In the summer of 2005, armed with a one way ticket to Bangkok, I left the States to go travelling for a year (this has now turned into three). This was spurred by a combination of losing my job and my apartment in one fell swoop. After finishing my whine about how my life was falling apart, I decided that joblessness and homelessness and partnerlessness and schoollessness don't come into confluence often, and I should take advantage of it. It also helped that I landed a sweet, part-time, remote editing gig that I can essentially do from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection (which at this point appears to be ubiquitous).

I spent an autumn ('05) in Bangkok, a winter ('05-06) in Bangladesh, and a spring ('06) in Barcelona. I couldn't afford the rent in Spain anymore (and got sick of eating salad and fruit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner), so I sadly left Barcelona in high summer and couchsurfed through the US.

In the fall of '06, I returned to Bangladesh on a Fulbright scholarship. The Fulbright funded me to live in Bangladesh and India for a year and half to research and write my second book. I'm still in awe that they paid me to do what I was/am doing anyway.

I left Bangladesh in February 2008 and am now in the middle of a Latin American jaunt (Belize, Brasil, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Costa Rica; soon to come: Panama and Mexico). My goals are to have fun and see some of the world. It's working brilliantly so far. Oh, and I am writing lots (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry), taking a billion photographs, relearning Bangla and Spanish, sending out submissions to literary magazines, holding photography exhibitions, teaching yoga, and volunteering. I am planning to move to New York City in September 2008 in order to find an agent and publisher for my two books, an autobiographical novel, Olive Witch, An American Dream, and my new book, a linked collection of stories, poems, and photographs called the Lovers and the Leavers.

The best way to get in touch with me is via email, and as anyone who knows me will tell you, I give good email, so bring it on.

Last updated June 3, 2008.