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2020 Recipient

Mariya Taher

Named one of six experts to watch on female genital cutting (FGC) by NewsDeeply.com, Mariya Taher has worked in the gender violence field for over a decade in the areas of teaching, research, policy, program development, and direct service. She has worked at Saheli, Support and Friendship for South Asian Women & Families, W.O.M.A.N., Inc., Asian Women’s Shelter, San Francisco Dept on the Status of Women, San Francisco State University, and was a 2014 Women’s Policy Institute Fellow through the Women’s Foundation of California.

She also graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in 2016, where she received the 2014 Graduate School of Arts & Social Sciences Dean’s Merit Scholarship and the 2016 Lesley University Graduate Student Leadership Award. She writes both fiction and nonfiction and has contributed articles and stories to NPR’s Code Switch, HuffPost, The Fair Observer, Brown Girl Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, The Express Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, The Flexible Persona, Cecile’s Writers Magazine, and more.

Currently, she serves on the inaugural steering committee for the US End FGM/C Network and is working with the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association on passing state legislation to criminalize FGC and create community education and outreach programs within the state on this issue. In 2015, she co-founded Sahiyo, an award-winning, transnational organization with the mission to empower Asian communities to end FGC. The Manhattan Young Democrats honored her as a 2017 Engendering Progress honoree and ABC news did a special feature on her, entitled: Underground: American Woman Underwent Female Genital Mutilation Comes Forward. In 2018, Mariya received the Human Rights Storytellers Award from the Muslim American Leadership Alliance.