Seema Yasmin

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor and poet. She writes across genres and has won poetry contests, narrative non-fiction awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in 2017 for breaking news reporting. She loves to write, period.

Seema trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and worked as a hospital doctor before moving to the U.S. to serve as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service. As a disease detective, she hunted viruses and other pathogens across American Indian reservations and inside prisons. Then she pursued her love for telling stories and studied journalism.

Her first book, The Impatient Dr. Lange, is a biography of her mentor, an AIDS scientist who believed he was close to finding a cure for HIV. He was killed on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014 when it was shot out of the sky by terrorists in Ukraine. Her second book, Viral BS (Johns Hopkins University Press), dissects pseudoscience and medical myths and explores why fake health news spreads faster than microbes. Her debut project for young adults, What the Fact?!: Finding Truth in All the Noise (Simon & Schuster), guides teens to navigate misinformation and disinformation in our fast-moving media landscape, and has already garnered two starred reviews.

Her first collaboration with Full Circle Literary colleague, illustrator Fahmida Azim, was the award-winning Muslim Women Are Everything: Stereotype-Shattering Stories of Courage, Inspiration and Adventure (HarperDesign). She and Fahmida Azim are currently working on their follow-up illustrated title, Djinnology, which invites readers into the realm of the supernatural spirits of Islam (Chronicle Books, 2023). Seema’s If God Is A Virus poetry collection, inspired by her reporting of the deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, was included in Haymarket’s BreakBeat Poets series, and was named one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2021.

Seema will be co-authoring Under the Gun by Dr. Cedric Dark, examining the gun crises from a healthcare perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and is authoring a new Handbook of Science Journalism and co-writing a Nobel Prize winner’s book about science and politics for JHUP as well.

She continues to teach, speak, and push the boundaries of what is possible for medicine, journalism, female empowerment and the written word.

Twitter @DoctorYasmin

Instagram @drseemayasmin

Reviews for What the Fact?!:

A savvy, accessible, and critical guide to media literacy.
– Kirkus Reviews starred review

Journalist Yasmin (If God Is a Virus, for adults) effectively explores contemporary media literacy’s barriers and how to overcome them in this eye-opening work told via contagion and vaccine metaphor.
– Publishers Weekly starred review