About Saba Khalid.

FOUNDER · POETICA STUDIO

Saba Khalid

writes the strategy, teaches the practice, hands AI the busywork.

BOOK ME TO SPEAK →

Writer, poet, comic book designer, performer, narrative strategist, startup founder, social-impact lifer and professional car-singer.

I was born in small-town Bahawalpur, grew up in Karachi, and moved to California in 2022 to reclaim authorship over my life and my work.

In the last 4 years, California spun me around — San Mateo, Sebastopol, Mendocino, Ukiah, Santa Rosa, Penngrove, Petaluma.

In Pakistan, I was the girl behind Raaji — see her in the rooms → — or more simply, the idea of reproductive health education through a chatbot — way before we had these things called ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Xylophraze-9b or whatever launched this week.

Inspired by the death of social media influencer Qandeel Baloch — I wrote her story in 2016 → — I founded Aurat Raaj and RAAJI, led the product and its safeguarding, and wrote every answer the chatbot gave. Engineers built the code. In a single session in four Karachi schools, girls agreeing that “a period is nothing to be ashamed of” went from 29% to 84% — before she went to twenty-two villages with no internet.

I've shaped narrative strategy for global nonprofits, built a child-facing chatbot with UNICEF, and mentored founders as a Visiting Social Entrepreneur at Stanford GSB.

Before that, journalism — Rolling Stone Germany, Axel Springer, Kulturaustausch, Dawn, The Express Tribune, the International Herald Tribune. I'm neurodivergent — my superpower: I see the angles most rooms miss.

I use AI intentionally — as a thinking and strategic partner. With it I've made a pocket-sized book of poems called The Becoming, a memoir in progress called Sharam, a comic series on labour and AI — and teach the practice to people whose work deserves the hours back.

I was teaching a chatbot to explain periods to teenage girls — and teaching those girls to question the society, stereotypes and systems built to keep them quiet.