WRITER. PHOTOGRAPHER. PODCASTER. VIDEO EDITOR.
Hey, Nice to Meet You.
Aymann Ismail is...
is a staff writer at Slate known for his multimedia journalism exploring identity, religion, and the human stories behind national headlines. His work often blends photography, audio, and video to create intimate, deeply reported pieces. He is the creator of Who’s Afraid of Aymann Ismail?, a Slate video series that confronts stereotypes and offers nuanced portraits of American Muslims and their perceived adversaries.
Ismail also hosted the podcast Man Up, which examined modern masculinity through conversations about family, relationships, race, and vulnerability. His work has been featured by CNN, The New York Times, NPR, GQ, Fox News, The New York Post, Adweek, The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, Gawker, The Huffington Post, or The Guardian.
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.
He is the author of Becoming Baba, a memoir about fatherhood, identity, and faith, to be published by Doubleday in July 2025. He currently writes about fatherhood, reflecting on how his experience as a young Arab American Muslim shapes his perspective as a parent to two small children living in Newark, New Jersey.
As seen on...
“We can’t afford to become an invisible minority right now. Muslims really need to be present,”
“I see our relationship as a kind of protest—both against that idea of what I expected a Muslim marriage to be, and against the anti-Muslim stereotypes in American culture.”
“I like to think we are all against the same things in America, [we] just really suck at communicating,”
“The idea was never to solve the problem about Muslims in America,” Ismail said. “It was all about trying to complicate the narrative.”