Qurat ul Ain

Development Director (she/they)

Before I came to SAL, I served as Co-Executive Director at a non-profit gender justice law firm, focusing on advancing gender equity and justice.

I moved to Seattle from Washington, D.C., but I’ve never stopped feeling like a nomad at heart. There’s a Welsh word, hiraeth; a kind of homesickness for a place or time that may never have truly existed, that describes my idea of home perfectly. I imagine many of us with immigrant or refugee roots know that feeling all too well.

On my desk, you’ll find a light-up Pennywise bobblehead gifted to me by a colleague, a handful of crystals, and a stress ball shaped like a D.C. Metro train that my partner gave me nine years ago.

My favorite book at the moment is an early print of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, adorned with exquisite hand-painted artwork. It’s an old, fragile treasure. I’ve read the Rubáiyát hundreds of times, even studied it in school, but I stumbled upon this particular edition at a book fair, and it completely transformed the experience for me. Reading it has become a ritual: I sit away from my pets and coffee mugs, wash my hands, slip on a pair of gloves, and lose myself in the interplay of poetry and art. The verses resonate far more deeply now, as an adult who has lived, than they ever did in adolescence. It’s an experience of the senses, the scent of aged paper, the smudged paint, and the elegant calligraphy, all of it feels like a part of me.

I don’t have a personal motto of my own. Instead, I carry the words of James Baldwin, wisdom that has guided me through the struggles of understanding who I am. He helped me see what I didn’t know, and he showed me how much I will always have to learn.