Her Story
A life of her own making
Khaliah Ali was born in June 1974, one of Muhammad Ali's nine children. Her mother was born Wanda Bolton and was later known as Aaisha. But this page is not about the family she was born into — it is about the woman she became: a designer, an author, and a worker for other people.
She built a career in fashion at a time when the industry had little room for women who looked like her customers — she has been, in the words of her Juvenile Law Center biography, every size from 8 to 24 herself, and she designed accordingly. She wrote a book about the hardest fight of her life, against obesity. And over decades she attached her name and her time to organisations that feed children, house families, defend young people, and fight for the wrongfully convicted.
Love and partnership
On October 6, 2024, in Southampton, New York, she married Jason Flom (PEOPLE). Sixteen days later, on October 22, 2024, the two of them together received the first National Arts for Learning Award for Visionary Leadership & Impact at the Young Audiences Arts for Learning national benefit gala — honoured, as Young Audiences put it, for their decades of humanitarian service. Their shared work for people they believe were wrongfully convicted is told on the Justice page.
A place from childhood
She spent childhood summers at her father's training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania — a place now owned and restored by Mike Madden and open to the public free of charge, May to October on weekends and by appointment on weekdays. In October 2026 she returned there as a collaborator, with photographer Jeff Julian, on Fighter's Heaven in Art: twelve mixed-media paintings by artist Mark Dickens carrying forty-five handwritten quotations, premiered at the camp on October 10, 2026 (FightNews). It is one small, factual footnote in her story — her story is the work above.