My name is Raashida Khan and I was very excited to see your position advertised on LinkedIn as it feels like I have been preparing for this role for most of my working life. I have performed various roles over the years but writing has always been a core skill in whichever position I have been working at. My attached CV refers, but as a quick overview, my skills and experience include project management, training, advertising and communications, client service, strategy, community curation, content curation and content creation. I have worked in the NGO sector for many years as a project manager and communications manager. The jobs have been primarily in the child and education sector – schools management, teacher training, access to information technology, but also in the health sector. For the last six years of my formal employment, which ended in 2015, I worked in the advertising and communication industries, covering all aspects of client service, marketing and communication, including PR, brand management and strategy, content curation and creation, community management and collaboration across digital platforms. As an aside, please note that I was recently invited to represent South Africa as a panellist for the Heritage Talks Series on Faith by The Smithsonian Institute. Several African countries are participating, and the talks are to be held later this year. This involves research, readings and preparations for panel discussions, and rekindled another passion of mine - research. Learning more about your organisation and your clients would feed this interest. Over the past few years, I have honed my social media and technology skills, having created and managed my own web site and social media platforms. These have been specific to writing and publishing, but the skills acquired have increased my overall understanding and implementation knowledge and skills significantly. At the end of 2015, I took a 6-month sabbatical which I extended indefinitely as my writing career took off. I have been writing full-time for the past five years, while still working with a few NGO and small business clients on content creation. This has included report writing, website/brochure content creation, editing and proofreading. My clients include the Graca Machel Trust and The Valley Trust, a pro-bono client. I have references from clients, should you need them. On the corporate side, clients include Astura Beverages (a small company marketing non-alcoholic beverages) and konektd (a digital App). In this time, I’ve also written and published three novels (the first of which won an award), a short story collection and a poetry anthology. I am attaching my author bio below. As you will see, it has been an extremely productive time. I look forward to hearing from you and chatting about the position. Author biography: Raashida Khan Raashida (Raashi) Khan is a 50-something South African Muslim woman living in Johannesburg. She was born in Durban, her favourite city where she lived for the first twenty-seven years of her life. Raashida studied at the University of KwaZulu Natal qualifying with BA Hons (Economic History) in 1992. Raashida worked at a bank before marrying and moving to Gauteng where she worked as a project manager at three NGOs, and in client service at several marketing and advertising agencies. She loves books and reading and has always wanted to write fiction. Raashida has been married for over twenty years and has two university-going sons. As a caring, compassionate and empathetic person who loves observing people and life, she is a storyteller of note. She would like to be remembered as being ‘never boring.’ A content creator, copywriter, editor and proofreader by day, she is as passionate about being an author, poet, wife, mother and friend – a unicorn that does exist. Raashida facilitates workshops on writing prose and poetry and discussions around her passion projects. Her short story Your Voice, My Strength was selected as the winning entry for the 2017 Irtiqa Online Magazine (South African Muslim Women’s Short Story Competition). Raashida was on the judging panel for the 2019 Irtiqa Short Story Competition. Another short story, It’s not Funny, appears in the Happy Holidays Anthology available on Amazon. Her contribution, Hungry, darling? appears in Saffron: A Collection of Personal Narratives by Muslim Women (launched 8 April 2018). Another of her stories appears in The Drumbeats for Africa (a literary collection project by The Durban Review). Womandla (a collection of women’s short stories, essays and poetry), launched in 2019 in Durban, features her short story, A Hundred Times Over. Raashida’s first novel, Mirror Cracked won the Minara Aziz Hassim Literary Award (Debut category, 2017), and has been serialised into a radio drama by Lotus FM. Fragrance of Forgiveness, the sequel, was launched in March 2019, and has been very well received. She has also published an anthology of poetry, Happy Birthday, Raashi, and another of short stories: Your Voice, My Strength and Other Stories. Her latest novel, The Cursed Touch was launched in September 2020. In the meanwhile, she continues penning emotional, emotive poetry and the occasional social commentary blog. Read independent reviews of her work here: http://www.******.*** http://www.******.*** http://www.******.*** http://www.******.*** http://www.******.*** Read her writings and musings on her website: http://www.******.***