Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. She is based in New York.

She is a columnist for Qatar’s Al Arab newspaper, Israel’s The Jerusalem Report, Denmark’s Politiken and Metro Canada. Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in The Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune and she has appeared as a guest analyst in several media outlets.

In 2010 the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver named her recipient of the Anvil of Freedom Award.

In 2009, the European Union awarded her its Samir Kassir Prize for Freedom of the Press for her opinion writing and Search for Common Ground named her a winner of its Eliav-Sartawi Award for Middle Eastern Journalism.

Before she moved to the U.S. in 2000, Ms Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, including in Cairo and Jerusalem as a Reuters correspondent and she reported for various media from Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China. Ms Eltahawy was the first Egyptian journalist to live and to work for a western news agency in Israel.

Ms. Eltahawy is a prominent lecturer and researcher on the blogging and social networking movement in the Arab world. As an adjunct at the New School for General Studies in 2009 she taught a course on media in the Arab world and she taught a course at the U.N.-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica in 2009 on women and New Media in the Middle East.

Mona was born on Aug. 1, 1967 in Port Said, Egypt and has lived in the U.K, Saudi Arabia and Israel. She calls herself a proud liberal Muslim. In 2005, she was named a Muslim Leader of Tomorrow by the American Society for Muslim Advancement and she is a member of the Communications Advisory Group for Musawah, the global movement for justice and equality in the Muslim family.

For speaking fees, write to info@monaeltahawy.com