About

Gabby Mijalski-Fahim is a writer, essayist and poet based in Portland, Oregon.

The daughter of a French mother and an Egyptian father, her writing is shaped by questions of identity, inheritance, belonging, and the quiet ways the past continues to inhabit the present. Raised within religious schooling and later coming to understand herself as a lesbian, she has long been interested in the ways faith, sexuality, family, and culture intersect and conflict. She writes across essays, short stories, poetry, and cultural criticism, exploring queerness, loneliness, neurodivergence, politics, memory, anxiety, and the often uncomfortable process of becoming oneself. Her work is drawn to the contradictions of ordinary life and the emotional terrain that exists beneath it.

For nearly a decade, Gabby has worked within advocacy and grassroots organizing spaces, contributing to political campaigns, public initiatives, legislative offices and community-driven movements, as well as completing her graduate studies in public policy. Those experiences continue to shape her writing. She is interested not only in the mechanics of politics but in the interpersonal and psychological binds that make up political systems. Her essays examine the intersection of public policy and private experience, asking how institutions shape identity, memory, relationships, and the stories people tell themselves in order to survive.

As an adult with ADHD, hobbies are often fleeting and impermanent but writing has remained the one enduring constant throughout her life. Since childhood, it has been the place where she returns to untangle anxiety, grief, joy, rage, devotion, shame, and wonder. It is how she makes sense of uncertainty and how she attempts to understand a world that is at once deeply beautiful and at another, devastatingly misleading.

Much of her work is informed by the lingering bruises of childhood, the complexities of queer identity, the influence of religious education, severe anxiety, neurodivergence and an enduring fascination with the strange ways people construct meaning from fractured histories. She is far less interested in certainty and far more interested in contradiction.

Her fiction travels through alternate worlds and subtle surrealism, using fictional settings to reveal emotional truths. Her poetry is intimate and introspective, while her essays often blend memoir, political thought, and cultural commentary. Across every genre, her work returns to themes of identity, loneliness, devotion, power, culture, alternate realities, and the awkward, painful, and miraculous experience of being human.

Gabby is published in several literary journals and small presses, and writes monthly Substack newsletters featuring essays, short stories, poetry, and reflections on politics, culture, and everyday life.

This portfolio brings together a selection of her published and ongoing work.