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Wajahat Ali
Wajahat Ali helps organizations build inclusive cultures through storytelling, diversity and inclusion strategy, and cross-cultural communication. He works with corporate and academic audiences as a New York Times contributing writer, TED speaker, and Amazon Best Book author.
Wajahat Ali is a writer, storyteller, and advocate who challenges audiences to rethink what it means to build an inclusive America through personal narrative and collective action.
Ali is a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times, a TED speaker, and the author of Go Back to Where You Came From, named one of Amazon's Best Books of the Year. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post and The Atlantic.
Drawing from his experience as a Muslim Pakistani-American navigating immigration, politics, and parenthood, Wajahat offers audiences a framework for turning personal struggle into community progress. His memoir and talks demonstrate how storytelling can cut through distrust and polarization, giving people practical tools to engage across difference rather than retreat from it.
Audiences leave Wajahat's sessions with a clearer understanding of how humor and empathy disarm defensiveness in difficult conversations, strategies for building coalitions across cultural and political lines, and renewed confidence that individual stories hold real power to shift public narratives.
Book Wajahat Ali to give your audience both the courage and the roadmap to create honest social change.
Ali's work with The New York Times and his Amazon-recognized memoir position him to help teams navigate polarization with practical storytelling tools that build trust across divides. His framework turns difficult conversations into coalition-building opportunities, particularly valuable for organisations managing cultural complexity or stakeholder tension.
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Wajahat Ali draws on personal narrative — specifically his experience as a Muslim Pakistani-American navigating immigration, politics, and parenthood — to present a framework for turning individual struggle into community progress and cross-cultural coalition building.
Wajahat Ali speaks on storytelling as a tool for social change, navigating identity and immigration, building coalitions across cultural and political divides, and engaging across difference through humour and empathy. He is a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times and the author of Go Back to Where You Came From, named one of Amazon's Best Books of the Year.
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The typical fee range is the speaker's standard in-person fee in their home market, shown in their local currency. It moves with format, location, date and session length: virtual sessions and shorter slots usually cost less, while international travel and peak dates cost more. Send your brief to PepTalk and the team will confirm the exact fee in your currency.
Not all of them, and it makes no difference to your booking. PepTalk's network of 15,000+ speakers covers talent the team works with directly alongside speakers represented by agents and agencies worldwide. PepTalk approaches the speaker, negotiates the fee and handles contracting either way.
Three to six months ahead is comfortable for most events, and 12 months is better for large conferences, peak-season dates or one specific in-demand speaker. Shorter timelines are workable, and PepTalk regularly fills last-minute and replacement bookings within days. Availability is the constraint, so get in touch as soon as you have a date.
