Alexandra Shraytekh received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Her academic articles have appeared in the Journal of North African Studies, and in the collected Magical Realism and Literature (Cambridge University Press), and Middle Eastern Gothics. Alongside her academic work, she is the author of two novels in Arabic, Always Coca-Cola and Ali and his Russian Mother. Her novels have been translated to English, German and French. Her third novel, Sweetmeats: or, Who Killed Issam Sukkar? is in progress. She is the recipient of the 2022 Creative Capital Award and was named the Fall 2022 Mary Ellen von Der Heyden Fellow in Fiction by the American Academy in Berlin.

Former research includes an EXC 2020 postdoctoral research project: Other Realisms: A Theory of the Arabic Fantastic (2022–2023)