thing what is awesome, one

G. Willow Wilson, in case you have never heard of her, is fucking awesome. To quote from her website:

G. Willow Wilson is an American author and essayist based in Egypt. Her articles about modern religion and the Middle East have appeared in publications including the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine and the Canada National Post.

Willow was born in New Jersey in 1982, and later moved to Colorado. She began her writing career at 17, when she freelanced as a music and DJ critic for Boston’s Weekly Digg while a student at Boston University. After graduating with a degree in History and coursework in Arabic language and literature, Willow moved to Cairo, where she became the first western writer to interview Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the current Mufti of Egypt and one of the most influential clerics in modern Islam. She was a regular contributor to the Egyptian opposition weekly Cairo Magazine until it closed in 2005.

Willow is a convert to Islam and her commentary often addresses Islamic and interfaith issues. An avid supporter of new and alternative media, Willow has written for politics and culture blogs from across the political spectrum, including Eteraz.org and Dean’s World; she also writes and enjoys comics. She lives in North Cairo with her husband, Omar.

In short: You do not fuck with G. Willow Wilson, because she is awesome and her writing is made of tasty meat. She keeps a frequently-updated blog at her website, through which she provides fascinating and incredibly informative links to a world that the United States media, at least, seems incapable of admitting exists - the Muslim world is a wired world, too, and Wilson, being clever, recognizes an opportunity to educate when she sees one. You don't need me to provide the links, and I'd rather you read the blog anyway, as Wilson is a much smarter writer than I and can provide better context.

She also has two comics, one out already, the other out soon: the OUTSIDERS: FIVE OF A KIND issue featuring the new Aquaman and Metamorpho (or is it Shift?), and an original GN from Vertigo titled CAIRO, which is a rather sober, realistic type of story about a man and a djinn and many other things. She has more on the way, and based on what I've seen of her output so far, I'm officially on board with anything she wants to write comics-wise in the future.

Plus, she wrote a paragraph that made me cry at the same time it told me something I'd never known before:

Most if not all of the Iraqi satellite channels went offline during the first year of the war. Then, in the autumn of 2004, we started getting a signal: a simple computerized list of displaced Iraqis seeking their relatives that would scroll down the screen as Iraqi folk-songs played in the background. Though we didn’t know who these people were, though a highly censored episode of Friends was playing on one of the culturally schizophrenic channels out of the Gulf, it seemed all of Cairo was glued to this timid little channel beamed from Baghdad. It was a sign; the olive branch retrieved from a flooded world, the simple message that the entire Arab world had been waiting for: ‘We’re still here’. People watched that scrolling list of names and wept.

G. Willow Wilson has a gift, and she uses it for awesome. And you should therefore be aware she exists. Hopefully once you start paying attention to her you'll realize you want to read more of her, and will buy a copy of CAIRO when it comes out - it'll be worth the expense, trust me. Or, if you don't trust me, trust G. Willow Wilson, because anyone who can write like she does deserves your money.