Seema Yasmin, M.D., is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, professor, poet, and author. She is the author of five books, including Muslim Women Are Everything and Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them. Yasmin trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in journalism at the University of Toronto. She is presenting two new works at Miami Book Fair 2022. In What the Fact?: Finding the Truth in All the Noise (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) the author addresses the importance of media literacy, fact-based reporting, and the ability to discern truth from lies. What is a fact? What are reliable sources? What is fake news? Conspiracy theories and online hoaxes have increasingly become a part of our national discourse – and it has never been more vital to develop the discernment necessary to tell fact from fiction. In her poetry collection If God is a Virus (Haymarket Books), Yasmin draws on original reporting from West Africa and the United States, as well as her experiences as a doctor and journalist. It charts the course of the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, telling the stories of survivors, outbreak responders, and journalists. Documentary poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, what role the aid industrial complex plays in crises, and how medical myths and rumors can travel faster than microbes. These poems also give voice to the virus itself, and shed light on viruses in general – 8% of the human genome is inherited from viruses, and the human placenta would not exist without a gene descended from one.
