Hiba Tahir is a YA author represented by Rachel Ekstrom Courage of Courage Literary. She is a full time English instructor and Instructor Coach at the University of Arkansas.
Hiba graduated with an MFA in poetry in 2022 from the University of Arkansas, where she was awarded the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund in Creative Writing, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award.
She has served as podcast host of Spine Magazine, as senior editor of the University of Arkansas Honors College, as an editorial intern at Tin House Books, and as social media director of Open Mouth Literary Center, as well as social media editor of The Arkansas International. She is the recipient of a 2024 Artists 360 Community Activator grant and a 2020 Artists 360 Student Artist grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council in 2021.
A former award-winning humor columnist, Hiba graduated with a summa cum laude B.A. in English and news-editorial journalism in 2018 from the University of Southern Mississippi, where she was an Eva & Frank Mackaman Scholar as well as an O.L. & Marie Sims Presidential Scholar in the Honors College.
In December 2022, she relaunched her college humor column as a YouTube channel and podcast called Tightwires, about navigating life and writing after grad school and outside academic and institutional confines. Through Tightwires, Hiba regularly shares tutorials, analyses, book reviews, and interviews with other writers.
When she isn’t writing or reading, Hiba enjoys photography, traveling, listening to her husband Joaquín Gavilano drone through translation metaphors, arguing with Nina, her domestic shorthair, or Lilo, her other domestic shorthair, or Luca, her mini-poodle, wallowing in her Kafkaesque existence, and lightly crisped mozzarella sticks. Against her better judgment, she loves the yellow on this page.
Hiba Tahir 