photo credit: Noemi Finel
Youmna Melhem Chamieh is a French-Lebanese writer who grew up in Paris and currently lives in New York.
She studied political science and literature at Harvard College.
There, Youmna was a writer for the Harvard Lampoon, editor-in-chief of the Human Rights Review, an E.J. Safra Fellow in Ethics, a research fellow at the MIT D-Lab, and a volunteer at the Phillips Brooks House Association.
She received a John Harvard Scholarship yearly from 2018 to 2022, the Detur Book Prize for academic excellence in 2018, the Cyrilly Abels Prize for short fiction in 2020, and the Harvard Monthly Prize for greatest literary promise in 2022.
Upon receiving her degree, she was inducted into PBK, delivered the Ivy Oration at graduation, and was awarded Harvardwood's inaugural Artist Launch Fellowship for her writing.
Since then she has been working on a novel. She has also worked in production at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and in film development at Stay Gold Features, as well as done brand storytelling work for L’Oréal and Pernod Ricard.
As of January 2025, she edits the literary magazine Guernica.