Sheba Karim Books in Order

Sheba Karim was born and raised in Catskill, New York, in the Catskills. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania and later earned a law degree from New York University School of Law. Her route to fiction was not a straight line, and that winding path shows up in the young people she writes about, who are often trying to work out who they are while expectations around them keep shifting.

After law school, Karim worked in family law for Legal Services in New York City, representing survivors of domestic violence, many from South Asian communities. The work mattered to her, but she began to miss writing and wonder what would happen if she never gave it a serious try.

She chose to find out.

Karim took writing classes at the New School and put together a portfolio for graduate study. She entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and left law to focus on fiction. Before arriving in Iowa, she wrote a humorous monologue at a Hedgebrook residency about a Pakistani American girl looking back on difficult teenage moments. That character and voice gave her the starting point for Skunk Girl.

Published in 2009, Skunk Girl follows Nina Khan, a Pakistani Muslim teenager growing up in a small New York town. Nina is smart, self-conscious, funny, and ready to have a crush even if the rules at home and the judgments at school make that feel complicated. Readers often come to the book for its humor, but stay for its honest take on family, body image, culture, and first independence.

Karim returned to related questions in That Thing We Call a Heart. Its heroine, Shabnam Qureshi, is dealing with a broken friendship, a reckless lie, a summer job, and a first romance. Urdu poetry, family history, faith, and the messiness of being young all have a place in the story, without turning its characters into simple symbols.

Her books make room for jokes, awkwardness, arguments, and bad decisions alongside serious questions about identity and belonging.

In Mariam Sharma Hits the Road, three South Asian American friends take a summer drive from New Jersey toward New Orleans. Mariam, Ghaz, and Umar each bring private worries to the trip, including family conflict, sexuality, religion, racism, and an absent parent. The Marvelous Mirza Girls takes Pakistani American teen Noreen Mirza to New Delhi after the death of a beloved aunt, combining grief, romance, family tension, and a close look at a city that is both exciting and difficult.

Karim has also edited Alchemy: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Short Stories 2, an anthology of adult short fiction. Her own fiction and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the United States and India. She has received support through residencies and fellowships, including the Fulbright-Nehru Scholar Program.

She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and works as a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. Along with writing novels, she teaches fiction, helping students wrestle with the same useful problem that shaped her own career: how to turn an idea into a story worth finishing.