writer Friends residency
June 10-24, 2026
Amna Chaudhry
Amna Chaudhry is a writer and activist from Pakistan. Her writing on Pakistan’s feminist and labour movements has been published in Guernica, Himal Southasian and Caravan India. She has received support from literary mentorship program South Asia Speaks for her fiction. Amna is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Minnesota, where she was a College of Liberal Arts Graduate Fellow in 2025. She is on the editorial board of Narivaad, a socialist feminist magazine based out of Pakistan.
Artist Statement
During my time at Good Hart, I plan to work on my novel-in-progress, Parlour Girls. Parlour Girls tells the story of two working class women who get fired from their jobs, start their own beauty parlour, and end up leading a city-wide labour strike. After getting fired, idealistic Mona pushes her best friend, the more pragmatic Neelum, into finally starting their own parlour. However, it soon becomes clear that the two have very different ideas of what it means to run a parlour. Neelum worries over keeping their new business afloat, while Mona becomes involved in organizing Karachi’s first beauty workers’ strike. The novel celebrates the love, friendship, and solidarity that Karachi’s beauty workers cultivate with each other in its portrayal of a sisterhood that enables Mona and Neelum to rise up against the numerous obstacles in their way.