Aymann Ismail is a staff writer at Slate, the author of Becoming Baba, and the president of AMEJA. He was formerly the staff video and photo editor at ANIMALNewYork. He grew up in Newark, NJ, received an art degree from Rutgers University, and was arrested by the NYPD for trespassing on the Williamsburg Bridge in 2016.

In 2018, he received an ASME Next award. In 2021, his essay The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd was nominated for a National Magazine Award in Reporting and won a Writers Guild Award.

His work has been featured by CNN, The New York Times, NPR, GQ, among others. He still lives in Newark.