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WORK TITLE: Another World Is Possible
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WEBSITE: https://www.natashahakimizapata.com/
CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, translator, and academic. Truthdig, foreign editor; has lectured at Boston University and University of Massachusetts, Boston; Robert Pinsky Global Fellow; has also worked at AGNI and Los Angeles Magazine.
AWARDS:Recipient of three National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards, for literary criticism; May Merrill Miller Award for Poetry; Ruth Brill Award, for short fiction; Falling Leaves Award.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and journals, including the Nation, In These Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Los Angeles Magazine; contributor to The Transborder Immigrant Tool Book, 2014. Translator of Alicia Borinsky’s My Husband’s Woman, and Liliana Lukin’s Theater of Operations.
SIDELIGHTS
Natasha Hakimi Zapata is an award-winning journalist, translator, and academic. She has contributed articles to a range of periodicals and journals, including the Nation, In These Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Los Angeles Magazine. Hakimi Zapata has also served as the foreign editor of Truthdig and as a lecturer at several universities in Massachusetts. She has translated works by Alicia Borinsky and Liliana Lukin.
Zapata published her first book, Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from around the Globe, in 2025. As a frequent traveler and resident abroad, Hakimi Zapata took those opportunities to see how various countries differed from the United States, particularly in the ways that they addressed many of the pressing problems in American society. She examines how social activists and progressive politicians in Britain turned the country’s healthcare system around. She considers how Singapore managed to ensure housing and house ownership to all its citizens, while the formerly conservative Norway enacted numerous socialist policies to subsidize parenting duties equally across genders and in both the long and short terms. While Hakimi Zapata acknowledges that some of these bureaucracies can be difficult to navigate, the benefits far outweigh any inconveniences in ensuring a society that works for the people and not merely the ultra wealthy.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly said that “the result is a fascinating and inspiring glimpse of how rational governance operates.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor observed that the book is “full of lessons for American activists on how to bring enhanced social welfare programs into reality, despite the odds.” Writing in Library Journal, Karen Bordonaro admitted that “by acknowledging challenges and still offering solutions, this book ends on a hopeful note.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2024, review of Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe.
Library Journal, January 1, 2025, Karen Bordonaro, review of Another World Is Possible, p. 77.
Publishers Weekly, December 9, 2024, review of Another World Is Possible.
ONLINE
Natasha Hakimi Zapata website, https://www.natashahakimizapata.com (May 25, 2025).
Natasha Hakimi Zapata is an award-winning journalist, translator, and university lecturer based in Europe. Her book Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America From Around the Globe (The New Press) was named a 2025 LitHub's Most Anticipated Book and featured in The New York Times Book Review and NPR.
Her articles appear regularly in The Nation, In These Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the former foreign editor of Truthdig and has received several Southern California Journalism and National Arts & Entertainment Journalism awards, most recently in 2024 for her work as a foreign correspondent.
Another World Is Possible is available for purchase now at Bookshop.org, The New Press, Amazon or wherever you like to get your books (you can also request it at your local library). Ebook and audiobook versions are also available, and you can order hard copies in the UK (here and here) and throughout the EU (here), too.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata is an award-winning journalist, university lecturer, and literary translator based in London, U.K. She was born in Chicago to a Mexican mother and Iranian father and raised in Mexico City and Los Angeles. Her nonfiction book ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE: Lessons for America From Around the Globe is out now with The New Press, and her work appears regularly in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, In These Times, Truthdig, Los Angeles Magazine, and elsewhere.
For her journalism and literary criticism, she has received seven Southern California Journalism Awards, most recently in 2024 for her work as a foreign correspondent, and three National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards for her literary criticism. She has also received several awards for creative writing, including the May Merrill Miller Award for Poetry, the Ruth Brill Award for short fiction, the Falling Leaves Award, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and was a semifinalist for the Dzanc Books/ Guernica International Literary Award.
Hakimi Zapata has been a lecturer at Boston University and is currently teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the former Foreign Editor of the Webby Award-winning site Truthdig, where she worked for a decade, and has also worked at Los Angeles Magazine and the renowned literary journal AGNI. The writer holds a Creative Writing M.F.A. from Boston University and both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles. In college she received scholarships from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Latino and the UCLA Alumni Association.
In 2014 she collaborated on the The Transborder Immigrant Tool Book published by the University of Michigan Press and in 2016 Literal Publishing released full-length bilingual editions of her translations of Alicia Borinsky's My Husband's Woman and Liliana Lukin's Theater of Operations.
She is represented by Rob McQuilkin at MMQALIT.
Follow her on Instagram at @natashahakimizapata, Twitter/X at @natashakimiz , or Facebook.
Zapata, Natasha Hakimi. Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe. The New Pr. Feb. 2025.432p. ISBN 9781620978443. $30.99. POLSCI
This distinctive book looks to other countries for solutions to social and environmental problems in the United States. Award-winning journalist Zapata traveled to every continent except Antarctica to examine how other national government policies changed the lives of their citizens for the better. Her book offers examples of successful policies she encountered that could be adapted in the U.S. Chapters cover the health care system in the United Kingdom, family leave in Norway, affordable public housing in Singapore, universal public schooling in Finland, the drug policy in Portugal, accessible internet for all in Estonia, renewable energy in Uruguay, a biodiversity law in Costa Rica, and universal pensions in New Zealand. Within each chapter, Zapata examines the history of the policy and its current form and draws a comparison with the United States. By acknowledging challenges and still offering solutions, this book ends on a hopeful note that positive change is possible. VERDICT This book is recommended and appropriate for libraries supporting students and general readers interested in exploring governmental policies from abroad that could work in the U.S.--Karen Bordonaro
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Bordonaro, Karen. "Zapata, Natasha Hakimi. Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 1, Jan. 2025, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824165408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=801d9928. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
Hakimi Zapata, Natasha ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE The New Press (NonFiction None) $30.99 2, 4 ISBN: 9781620978443
A tour of progressive countries and their solutions to problems of social issues such as education and health care.
An American resident in Europe, Hakimi Zapata tours the world to analyze the ways in which developed nations have enacted programs leading to progress in meeting social needs. "I became convinced that as we fight for a more equitable and sustainable existence," she writes, "progressives need to arm themselves with tried-and-tested ideas that provide clear inspiration for our own policies." In recent memory, she notes by way of example, health care in Britain was a congeries of charity hospitals, rural clinics, and private practices that confined good medical care to those who could afford it, leaving the rest to fend for themselves, very much like America today. Reforms enacted by social activists and strong political leadership led to the national program that, despite the cries of right-wing critics, actually works quite well: As Hakimi Zapata notes, her out-of-pocket payments have been confined to a few vaccinations not covered by national insurance for travel abroad. One such country a couple of generations ago was Singapore, where every citizen has access to housing--and, more, to homeownership, a stake in the game. Norway, once a highly conservative society, leads the world in social programs that include evenly shared, subsidized parenting duties, "a more equal division of family responsibilities in both the short and long term." Hakimi Zapata does note that bureaucracies attached to these programs can sometimes be cumbersome and difficult to negotiate, but the outcomes are unmistakable: Finland leads the world in education--"our only treasure," one administrator says. As for the United States? "America is not working for the majority of us," Hakimi Zapata writes. "Instead it's working for a tiny superrich minority that amassed its wealth on the back of our collective labor--and our collective impoverishment."
Full of lessons for American activists on how to bring enhanced social welfare programs into reality, despite the odds.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hakimi Zapata, Natasha: ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819570231/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=97c48204. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe
Natasha Hakimi Zapata. New Press, $30.99 (432p) ISBN 978-1-62097-844-3
Journalist Zapata debuts with an illuminating survey of how America's most pressing social issues have been handled by other countries. Drawing on more than a decade spent reporting around the world, Zapata explains how seemingly impossible goals for Americans--including affordable housing and childcare, quality education, and sustainable postretirement incomes for the elderly--have been tackled successfully elsewhere. Examples include the U.K. 's free national healthcare service, Portugal's adoption of an innovative new approach to addiction that deals with users solely via the public health system rather than the criminal justice one, and Singapore's nearly universal offering of public housing to its citizens (though Zapata explains that such policies do not help the city's "invisible" populations of migrants). Zapata focuses on the technical details of these systems, giving precise explanations of how they work in practice, as a primer for how they could work in America. Her reporting is colorful and impressive in its scope--later chapters delve into such lesser-known examples as Costa Rica's successful fight to preserve biodiversity from the coffee industry by inventing sustainable new farming practices. The result is a fascinating and inspiring glimpse of how rational governance operates. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 47, 9 Dec. 2024, pp. 118+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A820017346/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=354cf661. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.