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 essays, short stories, poetry, and cultural criticism. Across genres, her writing is informed by the lingering bruises of childhood, the complexities of queer identity, the influence of religious education, the anxiety of becoming oneself, 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.

For nearly a decade, Gabby has worked within advocacy and grassroots organizing spaces, contributing to political campaigns, public initiatives and legislative offices, 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 social and psychological lives that exist within political systems. Her essays explore 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 ADHDer, 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.

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.