Nexhmie Zaimi was a noted Albanian American author and journalist.

Nexhmie was one of the first six girls (along with her brother Mehmet) to attend high school in Albania, run by American Presbyterian missionaries. While a teenager in Albania, her traditional family tried to force her into marriage. She ran away from Albania and became the first female from Albania to achieve a higher education at Wellesley College. 

While attending Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, she married Henry M. Margolis, an attorney and businessman, in the 1940s. They divorced in the early 1950s. She had one son, writer Eric Margolis.

In 1938, her autobiographical book ‘Daughter of the Eagle’ was published and became a national best-seller.

During World War II, she worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency). After the war, she took a very active role in Albanian-American affairs, becoming president of the Pan Albanian Association, Vatra and collaborated with Abaz Kupin, Fan Noli, Faik Konica and others. During her career, she made a name for herself in the American media, especially in “Voice of America”, CNN, “Free Europe” and “Office of Strategic Services”.She aided Albanian immigrants and helped support her family in Albania.

 Soon after the war, she left her academic duties and national intelligence related commitments to go to Italy to be engaged in the betterment of the social status of thousands of Albanian refugees, who had escaped the oppression and violence of the Communist regime. She
became a key figure in lobbying at the White House and American Congress in the matters relating to the persecution faced by Albanians in the former Yugoslavia.
Having gone to Italy, Naxhmie spent some time in Calabria researching and investigating the Arbëresh Albanian tribe’s history and their middle age dialect. It was in particularly her outstanding role in supporting the refugees that lead Naxhmie to be granted the role of “Comandatoressa della Coronna d’Italia”, meaning “Commander of the Italian Red Cross” and was honored by one of the highest honorary medals in Italy. Throughout the years that she served in that region, Nexhmie also took meticulous records that give a complete and chronicled account of her activities in Italy after the Second World War.

In the early 1950s, she was one of the first American female journalists to report from the Middle East. She was also one of the first journalists to write and lecture widely about the Palestinian refugees, whose plight was virtually unknown at the time in the United States. She delivered a study to the US State Department in which she warned that unless the problem of the Palestinian refugees was resolved, it would blow up in America’s face in fifty years. 

She worked for the Albanian community in New York and New Jersey, translating at the New York Criminal Courts, and engaging in community activities and helping war refugees in Europe. She also lived for periods in Paris, Rome, Geneva, and Cairo. She was a strong voice in the US against Albania’s Communist regime. Her Manhattan home was constantly filled with journalists, artists, writers, diplomats, UN personnel, and visitors from Europe and the Mideast. Nexhmie Zaimi reluctantly left New York in the 1980s and moved to a retirement community in Santa Barbara, California. In her late 80s, she took over the care of three children from Kosovo who had been gravely injured by accident in a NATO airstrike. She continued to write her second book until her death. Remaining proud and defiant to the end, in 2003, her body finally gave out.

Awards and decorations
On the 8th of March 2012, the President of Albania Mr. Bamir Topi decorated Nexhmie Zaimi with the Order of “Mother Teresa” acknowledging: “One of the brightest examples throughout the difficult path of the emancipation of the Albanian woman that arose above the mentality of patriarchal society and became a prominent social activist and an eminent professional in the field of journalism.”
 In Albania and New York, she was widely known as “the First Lady of Albania”. Italy had awarded her the title ‘Knight Commander of the Crown of Italy’.She passed away in2003, at the age of 90.