Political Strategist. Storyteller. Artist.
Latest News
Grasping At This Planet Just to Believe: Poetry a Day Over a Decade of Ramadans is out now on Writ Large Press. Buy your copy today!
Aunties B-Sides: Taz’s #AuntiesWithDeadlyStare series is on display at Woodcat Cafe in Echo Park, Los Angeles now.
Giclee Art Prints available on Etsy now!
Subscribe to my Substack Wandering Ephemera
Special Projects
Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed plays at the intersections of pop and politics through a variety of mediums and actions. Motivated by her Bangladeshi and Muslim upbringing in Southern California, she started her career as an activist by creating a political voice for those most marginalized in the backlash of September 11th. In 2004, she founded South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), a national organization that organizes South Asian American youth to have a political voice and get involved in the electoral process. She continued on to have a twenty year career as an electoral organizer, mobilizing over 500,000 Asian American & Pacific Islanders voters to the polls using in-language culturally competent tools.
Essayist, poet, podcaster and screenwriter, her media content developed around creating a counternarrative for the communities that she belonged to - whether youth, Muslim, South Asian or counterculture. Obsessed with South Asian American radical history and using art as a disruption tactic, she believes in intertwining both for cultural organizing to shift political paradigms. Since the early 2000s, she's been writing on the internet - tackling the topics of seeking love, familial grief, South Asian history, Desi music, social justice activism, and finding faith through her essays, poetry, audio narratives and screenplays.
For five years, Taz co-hosted the now concluded The #GoodMuslimBadMuslim Podcast - its existence made a political statement that rippled all the way to Oprah and the White House. Though it was just a conversation where two Muslim women re-centered their narrative, the act of storytelling as Muslim women in itself was highly political.
Poet
Out Now
Grasping at This Planet Just to Believe by Tanzila Ahmed is a collection of poems written over the course of ten Ramadans meditating on searching for spirituality and resiliency of joy in difficult times. Out April 2024 with Writ Large Projects.
The Day The Moon Split In Two, published in 2020
Emdash & Ellipses, published in 2016
Taz has spent the past 20 years writing poetry and has performed on stages everywhere, including at the White House. She has self-published four chapbooks, and has been published in poetry books, zines and publications.
Since 2012, she's facilitated a Poetry-A-Day for Ramadan writing group of over 50 delightful Muslim-ish poets.
Visual Artist
Taz started painting profusely in 2011, after the death of her mother and the words got stuck. She gravitated to mixed media artwork using found items in her mother’s belongings. Her mixed media paintings address themes of immigration, identity, longing and often uses acrylic, paper ephemera, and wood. She’s open for commissions and giclee art prints are available on Etsy.
Aunties with deadly stare #17 (2021)
Featured as cover art for Lantern Review|9.1: Asian American Futures, ”Horizons“ July 2021 issue.
Hateful Overgrowth, Can't Fence Me In, & Drones Over Alponas (2015)
In 2015, laminated paper declaring anti-Muslim sentiment started appearing on fences above Los Angeles freeways. Taz liberated a set of these signs of hate and re-appropriated the street art in an effort to disrupt Islamophobia. Featured in Shahria Revoiced (2015).
America Drones On (2012)
A collection was featured in group show Rebel Legacy (2014) connecting history of South Asian American activism with contemporary social movements, linking local and global struggles for equity and social justice.
Civic Engagement
The #GoodMuslimBadMuslim Guide to Voting w/ Fusion Video (2016)
BEE A Winner. Vote. GOTV Video (2012)
Taz has an extensive background in electoral organizing - having working on voter registration and mobilization campaigns since 2000 elections. At the age of 24, she founded South Asian American Voting Youth which had youth voting campaigns in MI, CA, NY, GA and FL for the 2004 elections. Since then, her civic engagement skill sets focus on turning out low-propensity AAPI/Muslim/South Asian/Youth voters multilingually and culturally competently. Her 2014 campaign effort mobilized thousands of voters through a phone bank that called in 17 different Asian American and Pacific Islander languages. During the 2016 elections, she executive produced the Voices of Our Vote album to get out the #MyAAPIVote. She is dedicated to figuring out the changing landscape of voter engagement whether through voter data or pop culture tactics. She currently coaches organizations through their integrated voter engagement strategies.
Reports
Getting Out the Asian American Vote: Achieving Double Digit Increases in Turnout During the 2006 and 2008 Elections (2010)
New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: Reports on the California Votes Initiative 1, 2 & 3 (2006-2009)
Asian Americans at the Ballot Box: The 2006 General Election in Orange County (2008)
Driving Poor: Taxi Drivers and the Regulation of the Taxi Industry in Los Angeles (2007)
Writer
In 2021, Taz started Wandering Ephemera, a monthly newsletter of listed prose with no reason or purpose or goals - just musings and wonderings with some theories thrown in. Read and subscribe here to follow along.
Essays
Books
New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (2021) anthology
Pretty Bitches: On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That Are Used to Undermine Women (2020) anthology
Whiter: Asian American Women on Skin Color and Colorism (2020) anthology
Modern Loss: Candid Conversations About Grief (2018) anthology
Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (2016) anthology
Love Inshallah: Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women (2012) anthology
Good Muslim / Bad Muslim Podcast
The five year running and now concluded #GoodMuslimBadMuslim monthly podcast featuring Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed and Zahra Noorbakhsh was about the good and the bad of the American Muslim female experience. But you know, satirically & disturbingly hilarious. In May 2016, the podcast had the honor of the ultimate creeping sharia with a live recording from inside the White House (Obama edition). In April 2017, #GoodMuslimBadMuslim was honored by the City of Los Angeles for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month as Activists of the Year.
#MuslimVDay Cards
Started in 2011 as a personal counterculture art project by Taz, every year she makes six #MuslimVDay cards reflected the politics (and humor) of Muslim Americana of the time. The images created yearly have taken the internet like drones dropping bombs. Muslims love. Muslims laugh. Muslim have snark. If these cards make you laugh, but uncomfortably, they have done their job.
Music Curator
Mishthi Music is a blog that highlights music of the South Asian American diaspora, and then some. Founded and curated by Taz, it is a group blog of South Asian Americans that love music. Taz love of Brown-ish music also means she makes lots of mixtapes and hosts concerts.
oriental fantasy (2017)
The Desi Femme Rebellion
Good Girls Marry Doctors Mixtape
