zakia is of starshine and clay lineage. She is a 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Poetry Fellow and the author of What Kind of Omen Am I, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Cate Marvin. She was a 2016 Poets House Emerging Poets fellow, and has received additional fellowships and support from the Fine Arts Work Center, Callaloo Journal, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Cave Canem. Her poems have appeared in Adroit, African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Brooklyn Review, Burner Magazine, Epiphany, Little Patuxent Review, Mobius:The Journal of Social Change, Reverie, No, Dear, North American Review, Obsidian, the Offing, Thethepoetry.com, Torch, Under a Warm Green Linden, Vinyl, Washington Square Review, and the anthologies New Daughters of Africa (Amistad: 2019) and Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos: 2011). 

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She has worked as a community organizer at Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement; as a researcher at UNITE HERE!, a resource coordinator at Break the Chains: Communities of Color and the War on Drugs; and as a research associate at the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College. She completed the 2010 Activate! organizing fellowship at Social Justice Leadership and is an emerita board member of the Brooklyn Movement Center, where she co-founded the anti-gendered and sexualized street harassment collective, No Disrespect.

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zakia was selected as a finalist for the 2021 Publishers Weekly Star to Watch program, selected as a finalist for the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize by A. Van Jordan, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 by Under a Warm Green Linden and in 2013 by Beloit Poetry Journal, and has been in residence at the T.S. Eliot House, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. She earned a BA from Wesleyan University, and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College, where she also served as an adjunct professor. She served as a mentor for the Pen Writing for Justice Fellowship in 2021 and has served on the Brooklyn Book Festival's nonfiction committee in 2022, 2023, and 2024. She currently serves as a senior editor at nonprofit publisher The New Press. She is a Brooklyn native and loyalist.