When diagnosed with a rare form of acute myeloid leukemia in 2011 at age 22, Suleika Jaouad was given at most a 35% chance of survival. The diagnosis cut her career aspirations as a foreign news correspondent devastatingly short. But from her treatment bed at Sloan-Kettering, she began to write. Her experience as a cancer patient soon became “Life, Interrupted,” a column for the New York Times. Since then, Jaouad’s talks and writings have become indispensable guides for thousands of people around the world grappling with life-threatening illness.
She served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel, in addition to the national advisory board of Family Reach, and the Bone Marrow and Cancer Foundation. Her 2019 Ted Talk, “What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living,” was one of the year’s most popular, with almost 5 million views. In 2021, the same year her cancer returned, Jaouad published the book Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, a candid discussion of her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery—and a New York Times bestseller. This year, after marrying Grammy-Award winning musician Jon Batiste, her struggle with cancer as it interwove with her husband’s process of writing his first symphony was featured in the documentary American Symphony.
