Coraline Ismael Karim is an Arab-Indian-Ecuadorian transgender woman writer based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her writing is highly based in her past experiences in childhood, trauma, love, relationships, and existing perpetually as a transgender woman.
Born and raised in cisheteronormative and white Largo, Florida, her self-identity was less a reality and more of an existence within the "other" until she began her medical and social transition in 2020. Coraline and her late brother Josue were raised by their single Ecuadorian immigrant mother. The two were half-siblings, the latter's father having passed away when he was just two years old, and the former being conceived six years after Josue's birth after a one-night stand in Coraline's father's beach condo.
After her brother died in March 2018 from a semi-collision on his motorcycle, Coraline resorted to writing her grief in simple, amateurish prose and poetry as her verbal eptitude was never a strong suit of hers. Growing up, her brother was flawed like any of us in this world, though Coraline looked up to her older brother, confiding in him about her queerness at a very early age.
She is currently published in University of Tampa's Talon Review and will soon have her short story The Colour Red published in BULL literary magazine sometime in August 2025. She is now giving more focus to her novel series Step Into Oblivion and finishing up her last short story Bian Lian, a story a part of a series of prose pieces about the grief of her brother, the trauma of her family, and the loss of friendships from old childhood friends because of her transition.
Her current unpublished prose are: