“Reading is a subversive act”: Shenandoah interviews Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor–Elect Ghazala Hashmi

This is the first conversation in a new series, Catalysts, that profiles people whose craft—defined broadly—advances justice and equality.

Ghazala Hashmi—an immigrant, a former English professor, and the first ever Muslim and Indian American State Senator in Virginia—made history in November 2025 when she became the first Muslim woman elected to a statewide position (Lieutenant Governor). Shenandoah’s Special Features Editor, Nadeen Kharputly, sat down with Lieutenant Governor-elect Hashmi for a conversation about her early life, her career in education, her transition to a political career, and how literature has shaped her life—and her desire to make life better for her constituents.

Nadeen Kharputly: Shenandoah is based in a small town: we're in Lexington, Virginia. Our population is seven thousand people, which includes college students. We have a feature on our blog where we profile writers who are based in small towns to highlight their lives, their creative practices, and the rituals that they've maintained in their small towns. You grew up in a small-ish town in Georgia. What was that like for you?

Ghazala Hashmi: My father had his first teaching appointment—and really his only teaching appointment, because he stayed there for thirty years—at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. It was a very small college town. When we moved there—my mother and I and my brother joined my father in 1969—the population was about fifteen thousand when the college students were in town, otherwise it would drop down to probably about eight or nine thousand during the summer months. So the college, students, and faculty really bolstered that town. But it was, I think, the kind of life that my parents were both seeking. They wanted to be in a small town. They wanted to know their neighbors. They wanted to feel like they were connected to the community, and they wanted something safe. I think a lot of immigrants, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when they first arrived from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, were terribly concerned about crime and violence and the images that they saw on their nightly news. And so my father was looking for something a little bit more quiet, a place where he could raise his family and not be concerned about big city life, basically. So it suited them.

I don't know that it suited me [laughs]. I think my needs and my imagination were a little bit bigger. I found a space to really grow through books, which were a haven for me. The reason why the town was not fully sufficient, even though we had wonderful friends—I'm still close to the kids I went to school with from kindergarten all the way through high school—was that there were, I think, one or two immigrant families in that town, and we were the only Muslim family for quite some time. So in some ways it was a lonely childhood, just trying to find people who understood my background, understood the challenges of living in two spaces, basically as a young Muslim child as well as an American child. So it was a little bit of a navigation, and sometimes I wish we had more people in the community that we could have identified with and built real relationships with. It was a mixed bag in some ways.

NK: I want to ask about your time at Reynolds Community College and the moment when you decided to run for the Virginia Senate. The origin story that led to where you are today [July 2025]—elected to the State Senate and running for Lieutenant Governor in November—is that you had showed up to [work at] Reynolds, where you were teaching in January 2017, and you felt panicked by the policies of the first Trump administration and their impact on your students. I also taught during that time; I was at UC San Diego, and I remember my walk to campus the day after the [2016 presidential] election, feeling distraught and hopeless and scared for my students. I think it was a relatable experience for so many educators in this country, and I was curious what it was like for you to teach at that time, especially as a humanities educator where you might not have been able to—or you might not have wanted to—keep politics out of the classroom, or keep [politics] from affecting your students.

GH: By that time, by 2017, I'd been at Reynolds for fifteen years. And one thing that teaching at the community college level really highlighted for me was the tremendous power of education. I like to say that's when I saw education become visible in my classroom. Prior to that, my teaching experiences had been at elite private institutions: Emory as a teaching assistant, and then at the University of Richmond as a visiting assistant professor. And those students were lovely, but they also pretty much had their life charted out in front of them. At Reynolds, I was exposed to the full spectrum of the community. It was just amazing to be working in classrooms that had a mixture of first generation [college students], veterans, people coming out of the prison system and trying to re-establish their lives, and so many immigrant communities. Richmond is a major site of refugee resettlement, so throughout those years I had students from Sudan, from Afghanistan, from Bosnia, just a very diverse population of immigrant students.

I clearly remember immediately after Trump was elected and then, as we headed into January, so many of my immigrant students had traveled abroad to visit family. And they started sending emails to me, panicking about whether they could come back into the country. And we were seeing the chaos at Dulles airport, we were seeing all kinds of actions to block reentry for so many individuals, and I reached out to our Attorney General—Mark Herring at that time—and to other folks in the Northam administration to see what response I ought to be giving to my students. It was in February, Trump had just been inaugurated, and I was driving into work, and I heard on NPR that Trump's next policy proposal wasn't just to ban folks coming from Muslim-majority countries, but also to create a Muslim registry. And that was just so chilling and concerning to me—especially having worked just recently with students from Bosnia, and hearing the ways in which genocide happens, and how grievous the actions were as one population turns against another. I became very, very concerned about the direction of this country, like so many people. My husband and I called our older daughter—she had just moved to Fairfax—and we said, “Keep your passport with you. We just don't know what's going to happen.”

And that was a catalyst moment for me. I knew I could rely on wonderful people like [Attorney General] Mark Herring to stand up, but I also realized that it wasn't entirely fair to keep calling on allies, and that the Muslim community, in fact, had a responsibility to be representing and to be speaking out and to take a stance on so many of these issues. And so, while it wasn't clear to me that I was going to run for office at that moment, I knew I was going to do something. And then, in 2019, that opportunity opened up with the State Senate seat in this area. That seat had been represented by Republicans for close to thirty years and had a Republican incumbent. And I just said, “I'm going to do this.” So we decided—my husband and I made that joint decision—that I would run for the seat.

NK: Did you have a lot of support from your family, your immediate community?

GH: I had no support [laughs]. My husband was the only one. My dad was quite angry that I was taking this step. He became my biggest supporter, but initially… You know, my father taught political science. He had always studied government and politics, and he was so terrified for me to be stepping out. He knew the political climate, and he knew how fraught the situation was, and he was very angry. I went down to Florida, where he was living, to tell him and my mom that I was taking this step, and we had a very heated discussion. So we [my husband and I] had no support. But once I actually launched and began running, my father was immensely proud. He was the biggest supporter I had. He would sit and listen to my speeches over and over again.

But initially it was quite hard. Folks in the Democratic Party did not want me to run because they had an establishment candidate who was running, and I would be creating what they saw as an unnecessary primary in 2019. And it was a real challenge, just trying to introduce myself to the political circles to get two hundred fifty signatures in order to get on a ballot. I couldn't recruit volunteers, so [it was just] my husband and I and a couple of good friends—there were two Muslim women from Reynolds who would go with me after work in the late night and try to get signatures. It was an uphill battle, but we were just determined to do it. It took a long time to build, to get the financial capital to run a race. I didn't actually hire anyone for my campaign team until late March, and the June primary was right around the corner, so it took considerable effort trying to build support slowly with folks in the community.

NK: Just from a logistical perspective, I can't imagine the amount of energy and motivation it took for you to spend your day hours teaching and doing your full-time job at Reynolds, and then spending your evening hours campaigning. What was that like for you in terms of managing your schedule, finding the time and energy to spend all of your waking hours split between these two priorities?

GH: It was a real challenge. I was teaching one or two classes, and I was also a full-time administrator at that point. I had started the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, and that was an 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. job. I had to be physically in the office, not having the flexibility of teaching hours. And so it would be late in the evening, in the dead of winter—in Virginia, you can’t collect signatures until January 2—when it gets dark, early, and cold and snowy sometimes, my husband and I would meet in one of the neighborhoods in the district, and we would just start walking and knocking on doors and trying to get signatures. And then on the weekends and the evenings, every neighborhood association that would let me come and speak, we visited those areas and tried to connect with as many community members as possible.

NK: You decided to run for office because you wanted to stand up for historically and systemically marginalized people. That's something that motivates a lot of people to pursue careers in politics and also in education, because education is one of the most socially and financially transformative forces in the world. How did your work as an educator prepare you for your political career?

GH: I think my work as a community-college educator in particular prepared me for that. As I shared, my only teaching experiences had been in these elite educational contexts, and I'd gone to grad school thinking I wanted to spend the rest of my life in a small private liberal arts college, and that that would be where I would be the happiest. I remember clearly one of my dissertation advisors admonishing me when he knew I was moving to Virginia; he said, “Just stay away from community colleges—that will be the death of your professional career.” And sadly, that was the thinking, especially at that time: that if you wanted to be a serious academic, you had to reach for the top schools. The goal was not to be an educator; it was to be a researcher and academician, and it took me a while to release myself from that thinking. The community college is where I really developed that passion for social justice concerns and the impact that government and state policy was having on the lives of my students.

Over the twenty years I was at Reynolds, I saw the state government pulling away tuition support, especially from community colleges, and so there was an increasing burden on my students to pay those costs, and I saw so many of my students struggling. They were only taking one class at a time, because that's all they could afford. They were working two jobs usually, they were taking care of children. One flat tire could cause a student to drop out for the whole semester—they didn't have five hundred dollars. I had students who would become homeless in the middle of a semester. Many of our students were on food assistance programs. And so those levels of injustices that continue to create barriers for opportunity, for economic development, were so massive.

And at the same time, I had so many students just telling me how much their being in school was impacting their children's lives—that their kids would see them sit and do homework, and they wanted to sit and do homework, like mom or dad. And that transformative impact of education, the generational impact of education, was so evident, and I knew that we could do better at the state level to support these students. And so that was a huge motivation for me to run, and it's been a huge factor in the kind of work that I do, the legislation that I carry, and continues to shape my perceptions of what state policy ought to be.

NK: That must have been a complete revolution in your perspective in terms of what even small changes can do to someone's life, and then the lives of their entire families.

GH: It's hugely gratifying. I'm humbled every time that I am in these spaces. It's so gratifying to be in a position where I can champion and hopefully move for legislation and for budget. That actually makes a real difference in the lives of people.

NK: Absolutely. I think there's a parallel between looking at someone like you and thinking, “I see myself in this person,” and reading a text in a classroom (or out of the classroom) and thinking, “I see myself in this story or this poem or this novel.” Making someone who's part of a historically marginalized group feel seen and recognized—whether you're a politician or you're a writer or an educator—is an incredibly powerful feeling. Can you think of any instances where you experienced that feeling, or you helped one of your students make that connection, either in your academic career or your political one, just making someone feel seen and recognized?

GH: One thing I always said to my students is that if you read literature widely and deeply, you've met everybody in the entire world, and that has always played a role in my life. Anytime I meet people, I sometimes draw parallels to fictional characters, and then I feel like I understand them. I understand what motivates them, I understand their personality. Literature is hugely helpful in giving a sense of who and what we are, our histories, our different journeys, and then developing that sense of empathy for the lives of others.

I'll never forget one story in particular. I taught composition often at Reynolds, and those classes were the hardest. As you know, freshman writing: nobody wants to take it, and it's hard to motivate students. And I had so many students who had never read longer texts, let alone a novel. I had one student in particular one semester who refused to read anything, and he would sit in the back of the classroom, and just be rather belligerent in his answers, and he turned in very poor-quality essays, and was destined to not succeed [laughs]. But near the tail end of that semester, I had assigned Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner because it's an easy-to-read novel, but it's also compelling, and it pulls the readers in, and a lot of students enjoyed it. So we had just begun to read The Kite Runner (I would assign just a few chapters at a time), and this young man, who refused to read anything that entire semester, could not put the book down. He fell into it, and he's a young white man who had grown up in a rural part of Central Virginia, had never read anything about, let alone encountered anyone from, Afghanistan. He could not put the book down. He was so drawn into the story and the characters, and what he really loved was the cuisine, because Khaled Hosseini has these lovely long passages about the food that the cook would make, and how they would eat these delicious meals. When he came to class, this young man would just talk about what was happening in the novel, and he would say, “I just want to try this food, I want to sample it.” And so he actually went and visited some of our Afghani restaurants here [in Richmond]. And I just love that story, that it was so transformative for someone who really had never encountered another culture in that way, suddenly had become deeply engrossed in what was happening historically and culturally, within this context of this novel. So, so powerful. That's what writing can do for all of us.

NK: That's what writing and art can do for all of us—change your relationship to the thing that you weren't seeing before, or your relationship to yourself. As someone who has studied and taught literature for most of my career, I spent a lot of time challenging the myth that literature is this pastime for the elite. I do believe that reading literature is an immense privilege, and I wish everyone had access to it. But I disagree that it's an elite pastime, and I suspect you might as well. We both know that incredible feeling of bringing a text to a classroom and having that text open up a new world for a student. Can you tell me about the first time that you remember experiencing that feeling for yourself, with literature opening up a door or portal to another world for you?

GH: What you just said about literature being reserved for the elite—I think you and I probably share the perspective that reading is a subversive act. It is an act that has historically been forbidden to so many different communities. I'm coincidentally reading Percival Everett’s James right now; it's such a powerful retelling of Huck Finn's story. But it [reading] is subversive, and I try to always share with my students how powerful the act of reading is, and how dangerous it is, and that's why the educated elite try to keep it out of the hands of the “commoners.” Women were in particular forbidden to read, and any person of lower classes. I wanted my students to understand the immense power of literacy, and that's something that we can never take for granted. And we see it now with the banning of books across the country.

In terms of my clearest memories of introduction to literary writing… My dad was passionate about education himself, and so when he first came [to this country] as a student, he would try to buy these sets of books because that was so empowering for him to do. He had a little collection of classic texts, The Iliad, The Odyssey… I know there was Aristotle in that collection, and there might have been one or two hardbound decorative books. I have a really clear memory of picking up The Odyssey when I was about ten years old and just falling in love with it, with the poetry of it, and the description of dawn. The majesty of the writing, and then the story itself, was so compelling. So, I think reading and encountering a classic epic that shaped so much of Western literature was really important to me, and doing that at a young age was one of my first introductions to Western poetry, and that's when I fell in love with poetic writing too.

NK: You did your dissertation on William Carlos Williams. Were those some of the first steps that you took in your journey toward Williams?

GH: Well, toward poetry. So one thing I began to do, and this sounds very nerdy, but my dad would drop my brother and sister and I off at the small public library during the summer, and we would just spend the whole day there, and we were free to read anything. My parents never questioned what we were reading, or tried to censor anything, so I gravitated to picking up anthologies of poetry. I'm not sure what led me to that, but I would pick up those anthologies. I had several small notebooks where I would copy entire poems. So anytime I encountered a poem that spoke to me in any way, I would make sure I copied it, so I created my own anthology in that regard. And so poetry has always been deeply important to me. I originally was directing myself to British literature, but it was in graduate school where I realized what resonates most directly with me were the contexts of American poetry and the definitions of who and what we are as Americans. And so Walt Whitman became the foundational poet for me. And then from Whitman there was a connection to William Carlos Williams, and what he was trying to do in texts such as In the American Grain. And so that became my focus in the dissertation.

NK: Williams, in contrast to so many of his peers—Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot—is so underlooked. One of his most famous poems, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” is about this unassuming object. I was curious about what it means [for you] to pay attention to things—and, as a representative of Virginians, to pay attention to some of the most overlooked parts of our state?

GH: Not to leave Williams behind entirely, but you know he was an immigrant. His family were immigrants as well. His grandmother was from Puerto Rico, and so he has these immigrant influences, and he's trying to grapple with his own situation. I think poetry in particular teaches us to observe, to look for details, and then to try to translate the visual into the literary, into the verbal, to use words as art. And that's where that power of poetry comes in. Emily Dickinson is able to do that with the austerity of her language. I love the contrast between Whitman and Dickinson, when they're in a contemporary context. You've got one that writes these expansive lines, and the other who is as controlled as possible, and I think all of those are very critical to the artistic effort, and certainly both influence Williams. But for me, that's the essence of poetry: how to distill observation into as precise and as controlled language as possible. And it's very important in the impact that it has on our lives and the ways in which it resonates.

When I was first campaigning in 2019, I think one aspect of my connection to so many voters was the fact that I brought poetry into my speeches. I would quote Whitman and then move to Langston Hughes, and then make the poems connect to myself. In particular the lines from Whitman in “I Hear America Singing” where he talks about what that song of America is, and then Langston Hughes, as a Black man in the Harlem Renaissance, daring to claim that song of America for himself: “I, too, sing America.” That's a revolutionary statement. It's a subversive statement, too. I would conclude my speeches by saying, “I, too, sing America, as a Muslim, as a woman, as an immigrant,” and that concept resonated very powerfully. My tagline was “Ghazala Hashmi is an American name,” and it was drawn from that poetic sensibility, that line that starts with Whitman and continues to impact how we see ourselves as Americans.

NK: I was wondering if you had a writing practice currently, and if so, what does it look like?

GH: You know, I was just thinking that I need to get back to writing. And it's been a challenge, [with] the schedule that I have, to actually be in a position to be reflective and to be able to think through so many complex issues that are facing us. So, I do want to challenge myself to write longer pieces, maybe essays for journals, and I hope to work on—I don't want to call it a memoir, but just a collection of essays about my experiences. I have some of that written already, but need to really get a clear thread to tie some essays together and develop that fully. So I'm hoping, once the campaign is finished in November, that I will be able to focus on more writing.

I had started a writing circle at Reynolds where we would meet once a week and follow the practice of just sitting together and writing, with no communication or other extraneous distractions, and I find that really helpful. I need to find a group of writers to be a part of and actually do that kind of focused and intentional work that's so important.

NK: I'm a big believer—you're probably a big believer, anyone reading Shenandoah is a big believer—that words have a life-changing impact on people, whether it's something that you read in a text or words that you impart to someone else. What are some of the most impactful words that you've read or heard?

GH: There are snippets of poetry and philosophy that I always return to. I think often of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He has these pithy little sayings which can seem to be trite, but when you think about them are so meaningful. The idea of being able to change and evolve and contradict yourself, I think, is so important, because that's part of human nature. And I'm not remembering the exact quotes from Emerson, but he gives us permission to be evolving in our character and our understanding and our approach to the world, and I think those are always so critically important.

NK: Are there any particular words that might resonate with the American public right now? Which words do you think are running through folks's minds at this moment in American life and politics?

GH: When I was on the campaign trail after November’s [2024 presidential] election, a lot of the groups that I was meeting with expressed great anxiety, fear, concern about what's happening in our country. But the two words that keep resonating recently now, and they're very simple words in some ways, but they're powerful as we're looking toward November's [2025 gubernatorial] election [in Virginia]: hope and optimism. I am by nature an optimistic person. And so, despite the darkness of the times and the darkness of what's happening globally and in our own country, being able to hang on to—I don't want to call them shreds—but hang on to the threads of optimism, I think, is so critical and necessary because that's what builds resilience. And I think that's the word I really like: resilience. I do feel, as hard and challenging as this historic moment is, that there is resilience in this country. There's resilience in its people, and the goodness that I see in so many individuals is what I always hang my hope on. I like the word resilience, so that will be my word. I think we are a resilient humanity. And it's not just us as Americans, but we are a resilient humanity, and I think we will, as we have done, survive through very dark periods. And there's reason to continue to be hopeful for humanity.

NK: You mentioned earlier that you are currently reading James by Percival Everett. Aside from James, what was the last thing that you read that inspired you, or that is still simmering in your mind?

GH: I've been reading a lot of books on academic freedom and the challenges that are impacting our colleges and universities. There are collections of essays on academic freedom that speak to the moment that we're in and what's confronting higher education in particular, and where we need to go. That will be an important focus for me this upcoming year, especially given what we've seen happening in Virginia. I'm hopeful that we will be able to reverse the attacks on our colleges and universities. We can't necessarily make changes at the national level. But at least in Virginia, we can protect the institutions that I do revere. I see our higher education spaces as sacred. They're as sacred to me as any institutions of faith. Libraries and colleges and universities are sacred spaces, and I will be working to protect those areas. And so the books that I've been reading are collections of essays. Basically, those have been really resonant on many levels.

NK: That makes sense, not just given your [academic] career but also [with] the story that you told about your parents taking you to the public libraries on the weekends, and giving you the freedom to breathe in those spaces and encounter all those worlds. It's a gift that everyone deserves to have.

GH: Absolutely.

NK: Was there anything that you wish we had gotten to discuss in our time together?

GH: We didn't talk about young people, and I think that's so important for those of us who work in education spaces. One of the things that does attract a lot of us to this profession is the opportunity to continue to engage with the young. And again, if I look for areas of optimism, areas that give me hope, it is with the young folk I feel a privilege to be able to work, even outside of academia now. My staff and my campaign team, they're all in their twenties, they're all fighting hard. I'm not one of those individuals who despairs of youth. I find great hope because of youth. The young people I talk to and work with, they're so compassionate. They care about each other, they care about the world they live in, and they are fighting for issues of justice. And that gives me optimism, but it also, in my head, keeps me young, too, because I share a vision with them about where their future is, what they're focused on, and what really is important. It's such a privilege to be able to work with young folks every day, and I think a lot of us who are academics really are drawn to that because of the population we have the privilege of working with.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.