About Zamzama

Zamzama Safi was born in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan in 1997, the fifth of eight children.  At age 15, she was abducted by Taliban members and held for four days.  After escaping back to her family, she became an outspoken advocate for women’s rights and universal education, eventually graduating at the top of her class from the University of Karwan in Kabul with a degree in political science.

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          From 2012-2020, she worked as an interpreter for Coalition Forces, helping the US military provide aid to local Afghans and risking her life to collect intelligence on the Taliban.  She was forced to leave her family and her homeland during the Fall of Kabul in August 2021. 

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Since then, she has lived and worked in the US, and she is a public motivational speaker. Her recent motivational speech was at Yale and she is looking forward to her next speech at Vanderbilt University. She loves reading, cooking, driving, and dressing however the heck she wants.  Her favorite movies are Pretty Woman and Zero Dark Thirty.  She smokes hookah more often than is probably healthy. She also speaks six languages. 

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ZZ hopes her story will inspire people to face adversity with resilience, realize their hidden potential, and refuse to let themselves be defined by what other people tell them is impossible. 

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She was honored to receive a literary fellowship from Authentic Voices, a woman-of-color collective supported by the Women of Color Podcast and Women’s National Book Association.  

  

She looks forward to becoming a US citizen.  Like so many other refugees of the Afghan war, she prays that one day she will be able to see her family again. 

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Zamzama is currently seeking a publisher for her memoir, Never Give Up: How I Fought the Taliban and Won.