Barâa Arar is a writer and editor based in Toronto. Her creative and critical writing has appeared in WAYF Journal, This Magazine, cbc.ca, Canthius, Room, Rowayat, Ex-Puritan, and the anthology Muslim American Writers at Home. Her novel-in-progress was selected for mentorship by author Zilla Jones for the Writer’s Union BIPOC Writers Connect 2025.

From 2013 to 2018, she was a spoken word artist and slam poet, performing and competing across the country at writer’s festivals, university campuses, and community events, including Ottawa’s International VERSeFest. She represented Ottawa at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Victoria B.C, with the Urban Legends Poetry Collective and later published a zine of her early poetry. In 2017, she delivered a speech to parliamentarians on the power of storytelling to mark Islamic History Month.

Barâa has served on the editorial board of several journals, magazines, and presses, including the Hart House Review, Between the Lines, and most recently, as guest fiction editor of Rowayat. She is a Rhodes Scholar finalist and the recipient of the Carleton Provost Scholar Award for community engagement and immersive research. She holds a Master’s in History from the University of Toronto where she studied colonialism, photography, and gender in North Africa. She’s held roles in the public sector as an equity advisor and a cultural policy analyst.

She is currently working on her debut novel thanks to grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council.

She writes stories about Muslim women, faith in a secular world, and the visual art that moves us.