Bio: Saira is the founder of Literary Nights, an open mic in the historic Train Depot that welcomes published authors alongside amateurs, providing a salon experience right in downtown Issaquah. A lawyer by training, Saira also hones her craft as an essayist and fiction writer and she has been published in Pleiades, Witness Magazine, The Guardian, Identity Theory, and elsewhere.

On readalouds: “I grew up on oral storytelling in a Pakistani immigrant family. Hearing stories affects our brains differently… The feedback one gets from reading their writings out loud—did the audience laugh and sigh at the right parts? Did the audience’s breath change? Did we synchronize our heartbeats over the three hours we are together?”

On digital detox: She started Literary Nights in 2022 as an antidote to the digital flatness of our lives in those early months exiting the pandemic. As she explained in an interview with Canvas Rebel: “Enter the literary salon: an analog way to unplug and connect to each other in a more real way.”

On getting unstuck: “I let myself play or walk or eat or cry, whatever’s necessary. I go to a lecture, read, nap, doodle, write emails asking people for money. I sigh and wonder if I’ll ever finish the composition. I scroll and am reminded that reality is what I create with my own mind and thoughts. I continue.”

On open access: “Literary Nights funds itself through public grants and individual donors, and we want to keep it free and accessible, like the salon or library, a true space without transactional motives. A space radically inclusive that promotes radical self-expression.

On fanfare: Saira’s short fiction chapbook, Late Stage, was published by DeRailleur Press in Brooklyn, New York. A 2023 Periplus Fellow, her work was also shortlisted for the 2023 Coppice Prize in short fiction and named a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2024 Immigrant Writing Series. 

On inspiration: “The writers, artists, teachers that have nurtured me and shared their secrets and methods, ones I have met through writing workshops and retreats and classes and recitations and the artists I have read and seen and worshipped and breathed in. These people exist all over the world and in Issaquah and across time. The women who inspire me and especially those who disturb me.”

Hometown: Somerset, New Jersey

Favorite place near Issaquah: “I walk the Rainier Trail daily, and I also love the patio in the back of Paisley’s Tea Room.”

Find Saira: 

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