Essraa Nawar

2017 Ken Haycock Award Recipient

Essraa Nawar has been the Coordinator of Library Development and Marketing and the Chair of the Arts, Exhibits and Events Committee at the Leathery Libraries at Chapman University, where she helped raise over 1.5 million dollars in support of the Libraries at Chapman University. Over the years she has studied, lived and worked in many places, including the Gulf area (Qatar), Washington D.C., where she worked for The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, and Alexandria, Egypt where she worked for Bibliotheca Alexandrina. In 2009, she moved with her husband and family to Orange County, California in 2009.

Essraa is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, the Orange County Register and several other magazines and blogs where she shares her story as a Muslim Women living in American and is also trying to bridge cultural misunderstandings between Arabs, Muslims and Americans through her artwork. Essraa was also recently appointed to join as a Women Leader in the Internet Marketing Association. She is very passionate about and active in the topics of diversity, cultural and religious intelligence, interfaith dialogue and empowering Muslim Women. She thrives best in diverse environments and believes in the power of humanity. She thinks that we all have the power to change the world one person at a time. She recently took her diversity message to the international stage where she spoke at a TED conference at the Technical University of Munich on how to feel welcomed and empowered in a diverse world. Her talk (only live for a few weeks) has been viewed and shared more than 6000 times and have since been sharing her message through public speaking, radio interviews and podcasts.

Essraa is an aspiring librarian who received her Bachelor’s degree in commerce with an emphasis in accounting from Alexandria University, Egypt. She also holds an MBA from the American Management & Business Administration Institute, Cambridge, MA and a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership (MAOL) from Brandman University, California. She is currently pursuing a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) at San Jose State University, California.
Her professional interests include developing and implementing marketing, branding, and communications and fundraising practices to support academic Libraries as well as maintaining an integrated external relations model targeting prospective donors, current donors, board members and external partners.

In her free time, Essraa enjoys reading, listening to music, traveling spending time with her husband who she calls her best friend and soul mate, watching her boys as they perform gymnastics and diving, in which they excel and are both part of the USA National team as well as spending time with her 5 years old girl who is a ballerina.

Website: http://essraanawar.com/
Twitter Handle: @essraanawar