The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Spring Literature Grant to Bazeed for their first novel, “The Boy Made of Air”, novel written in obsessions & compulsions, in states of mind & stories within stories, in myths & fables, in multiplicities of voice & vector; about diaspora, subtext, and silence, and a pair of twins, one named after the sun, the other after the light. Set in the very particular dystopia of modern-day petrostate labor diaspora, The Boy Made of Air, like most novels about families, asks what is it we owe each other, of witness, and of saving.

Bazeed [they/them] is an Egyptian immigrant, writer, editor, spoken word artist, stage actor, and cook living on unceded Munsee Lenape land, colonially known as Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and personal essays, Mariam received their MFA in Fiction from Hunter College

Bazeed's work across genres of poetry, plays, and prose, has been published or is forthcoming from, Anomaly, Driftwood Press, The Evergreen Review, I Came for Couscous, In the Flesh, Hotel Magazine, Khöra, The Margins, Oberon Books, Red Hen Press, Saqi Books, and [wherever] Magazine. Their first full-length play, Peace Camp Org—available in anthology from Oberon Books, UK—has been presented at La Mama Theater, NYC (2017) in the Squirts Festival of Queer Performance Art; the Arcola Theatre, London (2018), in its inaugural festival of International Queer Playwrights; and The Wild Project, NYC (2018), in the Fresh Fruit Festival, where it won the festival's Spirit Award. Their play, Kilo Batra: In Death More Radiant, written with Kamelya Omayma Youssef partially in verse and two languages, premiered at the Arab American National Museum in 2021. As a performer of other people’s work, Bazeed's credits include Still Asking for It [Joe’s Pub, 2019]; and Franca Rame Project [Irondale Theater, 2019].

Bazeed's work has been supported by fellowships from the Asian American Writers Workshop, the Center for Fiction, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Sound Lab at the Brick Theater, the Sundance Institute Theater Lab, the Sundance Interdisciplinary Artist Grant, and Trans Lab; and with residencies from the Arab American National Museum, Hedgebrook, Marble House Project, Millay Colony, Kimmel Nelson Harding Center for the Arts, Paragraph New York, and the Visual Muze Artist Residency. They’ve been the recipient of multiple awards, including the Lanford Wilson Award from The Dramatists’ Guild, the First Pages Prize for their novel in progress, The Boy Made of Air, the Fresh Fruit Festival Spirit Award for their play Peace Camp Org, the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award, for their short story, After the Moroccan Baths, and again for their short story, Her Sirilankeyya; the Hunter English Department 1st Place Memoir Prize for their essay Samira en Moses, and the Andrew & Eleanor McGlinchee Prize for their play, Peace Camp Org.

Bazeed's currently at work on their first novel, The Boy Made of Air; their third full-length play, faggy faafi Cairo boy; and on thus spake Zulaïkha, a poetry collection in centos. To procrastinate from facing the blank page, Mariam curates and runs a monthly(ish) world-music salon and open mic in Brooklyn, and is a slow student of Arabic music..

Please visit Bazeed’s Instagram for more information.