Lael A. Mohib writes fiction about identity, belonging and loss. She earned a BA in communications from Mary Baldwin College and an MA in journalism & international relations from Boston University. Lael’s fiction has been published in Narrative Magazine as Story of the Week (2023), Tupelo Quarterly (2025), and Magazine1 as a Gulf Coast of Florida feature (2026). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times and Foreign Policy, among others. She has completed a novel, We Belong to the Living, the story of an Afghan-American woman discovering both herself and her father’s homeland during the most violent years of the 2001-2021 war; a short story collection, Bilagaana; a brief memoir about leaving Afghanistan after the collapse of the American-backed government, Payan Bagh: The End Garden, and a contemporary Southern Gothic novella, Hunting Country. She is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2024), the Key West Literary Seminar Writers’ Workshop Program (2025 and 2026), and a recipient of an Author and Poet Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing (2025). She worked abroad for 15 years in political communications and international development, including in Afghanistan, the UK, the UAE and India, before settling back in her hometown. She is the Director of Marketing at Sarasota Opera, lives in Bradenton, Florida and has three children.