SULEIKA JAOUAD 

Emmy Award-Winning Journalist & New York Times Bestselling Author

Suleika Jaouad is a writer, artist, and author of the New York Times bestselling memoirs The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life and Between Two Kingdoms, which has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes the #1 Literature newsletter on Substack, the Isolation Journals, home to a creative community of over 230,000 readers from around the world.

A three-time cancer survivor, she launched her career from her hospital bed at age 22 with the New York Times column and Emmy Award-winning video series “Life, Interrupted.” Her essays and reporting have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Vogue, among others. A sought-after speaker, her TED Talk, “What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living,” has more than five million views.

Along with husband Jon Batiste, Jaouad is the subject of the Oscar-nominated and Grammy Award-winning documentary American Symphony, produced by the Obamas—a portrait of two artists during a year of extreme highs and lows. When her leukemia returned in 2022 and treatment complications temporarily compromised her vision, she turned to painting to transcribe her fever dreams and medication-induced hallucinations. This vibrant, visceral record of grief and desire has since expanded to include large-scale watercolors, exhibited in The Alchemy of Blood, a joint show with Jaouad’s mother, the artist Anne Francey, at ArtYard. Most recently, she was commissioned to paint a grand piano for the 2025 SuperBowl in New Orleans, now on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and trio of rescue dogs.

Newsletter: theisolationjournals.substack.com

Website: suleikajaouad.com

Instagram: @SuleikaJaouad