Dr. Shumaila Hemani — Shifting Systems through Storytelling & Sounds

Featured in Alberta’s Favourite Reads 2025

What happens when your scars begin to speak?

What happens when her scars begin to speak?

Born in Pakistan and cast adrift in Canada’s immigration system after seventeen years of building a life there, Dr. Shumaila Hemani embarks on an odyssey through music, memory, and the enduring search for belonging. As she moves through institutions that promise recognition yet often demand silence, she confronts the fragility of artistic recognition and the realities of structural erasure, struggling to preserve her voice in systems that leave her visible but uncounted.

Blending lyrical storytelling, memoir, and autoethnographic reflection, Writing in the Wound traces Hemani’s journey from her ethnomusicological training under Professor Regula Burckhardt Qureshi at the University of Alberta to her apprenticeship with master Sufi musicians in Pakistan. Along the way, Sufi music becomes more than a spiritual calling—it becomes a form of resistance and a language for expressing what might otherwise remain unspoken.

At once personal and political, lyrical and scholarly, Writing in the Wound is a feminist memoir that invites readers to listen deeply—to the land, to longing, and to the courage of a Pakistani woman who subverts the silences of Canada’s immigration system, transforming her wounds into voice, music, and wisdom.

Writing in the Wound is not only about survival. It is the song of a woman reclaiming her power.

“Hemani writes as if sound were breath, shelter, lineage, prayer, argument, and last defense all at once—deeply moving.”

— Literary Titan

“A fascinating memoir. Shumaila Hemani’s work is multifaceted, beautifully lyrical, and crystal clear.”

— Barb Howard, author of Happy Sands (University of Calgary Press)

“Writing in the Wound contributes to collective human strength to heal the planet—in such a loving, powerful way.”

— Norine Braun, award-winning singer-songwriter

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🏆 Silver Award Recipient — Literary Titan

“I found Writing in the Wound arresting, thought-provoking, and fiercely alive. Its ideas are forceful and, at their best, unsettling. Hemani’s central claim that exclusion is often discussed in abstract policy language while its damage is absorbed by actual bodies felt painfully persuasive. What stayed with me most was the book’s insistence that the ‘wound’ is not just a private sorrow but a structural fact, something lived in the body and sharpened by institutions, and that song can become not a cure exactly, but a way of bearing truth without surrendering to it.”

— Literary Titan, Silver Award

Now Available in Local Bookstores

Request a copy at your local bookstore and library

Writing in the Wound is now available at select independent bookstores:

Calgary: Shelf Life Books | Owl’s Nest Books | Indigo Signal Hill | Indigo Spirit Downtown | Indigo Chinook Centre

“Writing in the Wound: Acculturation, Trauma & Music by Shumaila Hemani in Alberta’s Favourite Reads (Westword Magazine, published by the Writers Guild of Alberta)


This fascinating memoir covers Hemani’s journey through three continents, her studies as an ethnomusicologist (way more interesting than you might think!), her growth and multiple awards as a Sufi poet and musician, and 17 years of being denied permanent residency by the Canadian government.”

— Barb Howard, Author of Happy Sands (The University of Calgary Press)

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“I read Dr. Shumaila Hemani’s book “Writing in the Wound: Acculturation, Trauma, and Music” very slowly over several months. Each chapter offers new insight and an articulation of experiences, thoughts, and ideas that I needed to sit with. At the same time, I didn’t want to stop reading.

Hemani weaves the story of her life – family, mentors, music, academia, and nature together in a way that as readers we really need to stop and listen. In sharing her story, Shumaila asks us to deeply evaluate the architecture of the systems (education, religion, and immigration) that we live in and how we might imagine and do differently.

These lines have especially stuck with me:
-“The rules I had learned in academia – gatekeeping, scarcity, survival – had no place in the world I wanted to make. I chose a different measure of success: joy in my work, depth in my art, and the freedom to create without permission (Hemani, pg. 375).”
-“In that instant, I understood that home was not a destination but a return to my own breath — to the sacred space my riyāz had opened within me, a sanctuary I could recreate wherever I set foot in this world. This reassurance gave me strength to continue — to trust that wherever my path led, the music and the breath would guide me home again (Hemani, pg. 450).”

Thank you Shumaila, for sharing your story with all of us – a story of courage, belonging, imagination, and strength within a life that has experienced injustice, precarity, and silencing. “

— Geraldine Ysselstein, Former Artist in Residence, Alberta University of Arts

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Dr. Shumaila Hemani

Dr. Shumaila Hemani, a creative non-fiction author based in Mohkinstasis (Calgary), Canada, is a former music faculty member at Semester at Sea and the University of Alberta. Described as “arresting, thought-provoking, and fiercely alive” (Literary Titan), her award-winning debut memoir, Writing in the Wound, explores a scholarly journey shaped by immigration uncertainty and was featured in the Alberta Favourite Reads (2025). A recipient of the Women in Music Canada Honour Roll (2023) and the Cultural Diversity Award (2015), and a PEN Canada Writer in Exile, Hemani is completing a human rights monograph with Routledge.

Learn More

Featured in IHRAM Press’ Special Anthology on Hannah Arendt

Dr. Hemani’s story Catabasis was featured alongside 25 entries from Iran, Ghana, Pakistan, and the United States. Dr. Hemani also shared her journey to write this story in a special podcast interview with Professor Roger Berkovitz that will be featured as part of a Bonus Episode on June 5th on Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkovitz.

“Such a powerful and deeply moving essay… What struck me most was the way CATABASIS gives narrative and emotional form to the precariousness Arendt identified at the heart of human rights: the condition of living without full political recognition or belonging. Your reflection on inhabiting a space between visibility and invisibility, voice and enforced silence, captures with extraordinary force the human reality behind Arendt’s insight that rights depend upon a political world willing to see and recognize us…profoundly impressed by your contribution.”

Book Dr. Hemani as a Keynote Speaker


Writing in the Wound is a deeply moving and beautifully written memoir. Shumaila Hemani shares her journey with honesty and vulnerability, exploring identity, belonging, immigration, and the transformative power of music.

I really appreciated how the book connects personal experiences with bigger questions about culture, resilience, and finding a place where you truly belong. The writing is thoughtful, lyrical, and emotionally engaging.

A powerful and heartfelt memoir that stays with you after you finish reading.

— Eric Smidt — Goodreads Reader

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