FATIMA SHAIK ’70

Fatima Shaik is an Indian American and African American award winning author and former daily journalist. Her work explores contemporary social issues, especially that of the AfricanAmerican experience. Fatima’s research on the Société d’Economie, an early Black Catholic mutual aid society, received support from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and the Kittredge Fund, and led to her 2021 book Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood (The Historic New Orleans Collection, February 2021). That same year, she received the Louisiana Writer Award from the Louisiana Center for the Book and the State Library of Louisiana. The book received the 2022 Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award and will be Louisiana’s adult book entry in the National Book Festival of the Library of Congress. After reading the records of the Economie—3,000 pages of handwritten French stored in her family’s home—did she realize this community’s impact. She spent two decades reading the journals and documenting events with real estate records, legal cases, old monographs, and articles. Economy Hall is her first work of nonfiction and her seventh book.

She was born in the historic Seventh Ward of New Orleans and raised on the oral histories of Black Creoles told by her family and neighbors. A full-time journalist for more than a decade, she founded the Communication Department at Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey where she taught as tenured faculty for 25 years. She is a trustee of PEN America and member of The Writers Room in New York City. Her freelance articles appeared in Essence, Nikkei Architecture, L'Expansion, The New York Times, In These Times, and The Root.

Fatima attended Xavier University for two years before graduating from Boston University with a Bachelor of Science, and New York University with a Master of Arts. She was a reporter for the Miami News and New Orleans Times-Picayune before joining McGraw-Hill where she worked in editorial positions for a decade. She is included in A Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans and the Encyclopedia of African American Writers, among others. She is also the subject of a film by director Kaveri Kaul who takes the author to her paternal grandfather’s birthplace in Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal.