Association of Iranian American Writers

AIAW Member Profiles - Pages: 1..2..3..4..

Jasmin Darznik

Jasmin Darznik was born in Tehran and received her doctorate in English literature from Princeton University. She has contributed to the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. The recipient of the 2006 Tanenbaum Award for Non-Fiction and a 2008-2009 Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, she has also earned honors from The Iowa Review and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her memoir will be published next year in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Italy. She is a professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where she teaches 20th century American literature, including courses on the treatment of ethnic identity, immigration history, and human rights debates in contemporary fiction and creative nonfiction.

Katayoon Zandvakili

Katayoon Zandvakili was born in Tehran and now lives in California. Her collection of poetry, Deer Table Legs, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series prize, and the book's title poem was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published in journals such as Lumina, caesura, Five Fingers Review, Rattapallax, and anthologized -- American Poetry: The Next Generation, Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and the 2008 Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond. She is polishing her manuscript, In the Lap of the Gods: My Eight-&-a-Half-Month Marriage to an Impostor, while working on a novel, How My Manners Almost Killed Me, and three screenplays, Seagreen, Garance, and To Live As I Like: The Marie B. Story. Her dog Tintin has penned his memoirs, The Invincible Gatsby. Katayoon is honored to serve on the MFA Advisory Board at St. Mary's College and as a consulting editor to NarrativeMagazine.com. She is also a painter.

www.katayoon.net

Solmaz Sharif

Born in exile, Solmaz Sharif completed degrees in Sociology and Women of Color Writer at U.C. Berkeley. While there, she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her first published poem, included in A World Between, was written at the age of 13. Since then, her work has appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review and numerous campus publications. Her readings include Bowery Poetry Club, Hunter College, and Pacifica Radio.

Throughout her writing and research, she has been interested in the intersection between language and power. She is now working on a manuscript dealing with a dictionary of war, challenging euphemism and the standardization of state-sanctioned violence with eyewitness testimony and the precision of poetry.

Javad Mohsenian

Born and educated in Iran, Javad Mohsenian, M.D. is a psychiatrist, poet and writer, in suburban Philadelphia. He started his writing career in high school. Inspired by the farmers' living conditions, he wrote Waves in the Wheat fields (Mooje Keshtzasra), but no publisher was interested in a teenager's work. Preparing for the tough university exams, he studied every previous one he could put his hands on. He passed Shiraz Medical School exam and wrote a best seller (Rahnemaye Kankoor), a guide to college entrance exams. It was published by Elmi, a major publishing company in Tehran. His price for the exam collection was the publication of his earlier novel. His second novel, Today is also Late (Emrooz Ham Deer Ast), depicting the struggle of youth against the old traditions was accepted on a professional basis. Persian Moonlight, his first novel in English was a repetition of the old struggle until the doctor writer came in contact with a doctor publisher, owner of Moore Publishing Company. He published 9/11 Children, last year and is currently working on a novel in relation to events in Iran.

Dr. Mohsenian has lectured and written many articles on his favorite subjects, Attention Deficit - learning disabilities, immigrants adjustments in the US and Persian poetry.

Persis Karim

Persis M. Karim is a California poet and nonfiction writer. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals including Caesura, HeartLodge, and Reed as well as online journals such as shortpoem.org. She is contributing poet and editor of Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (University of Arkansas, 2006) and contributor and co-editor of A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans (George Braziller, 1999).

She has written articles on the emergence of Iranian American literature and identity and has co-edited a special issue of MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States) on Iranian American Literature (2008).

Her manuscript of poetry, Ways to Count the Dead, is currently being revised for publication. She teaches literature and creative writing at San Jose State University and is founder and co-director of AIAW.

www.persiskarim.com

Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, raised in Los Angeles, and lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, Bidoun, Canteen, nerve.com and FiveChapters.com, among others. She has been awarded fellowships from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, and The Sewanee Writers' Conference. She currently teaches Fiction at Bucknell University. Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic)--a New York Times "Editor's Choice," Chicago Tribune "Fall's Best," 2007 California Book Award winner, Saroyan Prize shortlist and Dylan Thomas Prize longlist selection--is out in paperback this month (8/2008).

www.porochistakhakpour.com

Esther Kamkar

"My poetry bridges the gulf from the far distant home country to the new ground of the United States. I bring my personal journey to life on the poetic page; I make the unifying connection between the experience of all immigrant journeys and the commonality of feeling lost, and then found. The themes and concepts of fitting in, isolation, strangeness, love that binds, and self-definition, speak to the heart of the readers of my work.

My poems demonstrate a large sense of the world. They look outward, directly at injustices and sorrows, and also inward, at my private world and the world of my heart. They tell the stories that lie deep within us.

My voice, the rarely heard voice of an Iranian woman, and an American mother living in the Bay Area, is informed by my childhood memories, dreams, and my poetic imagination in a new language, here and now. I have come from halfway around the globe; I have crossed borders and I do have something to declare. I bring with me a traditional loyalty to community, and a rich heritage of poetry. As a poet, I am constantly aware of the power of this artistic endeavor, its rewards and joys, and the gentle and elegant way it influences and enriches us all."

Most recently, Esther was this year’s (2008) co-winner for the Richard Maxwell Fellowship in Poetry.

www.estherkamkar.com

Manijeh Nasrabadi

Manijeh Nasrabadi graduated from Brown University and received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College.

She won the City University of New York Arts Gala Memoir Prize in 2005, a Hertog fellowship that same year, and a Hedgebrook writing residency for 2008.

Her essay “Souvenir” appears in About Face: Women Write about What They See When They Look in the Mirror, published by Seal Press in June 2008, and her essay “Forest Fire” will be published in the anthology Love and Pomegranates.

In May 2008, she was a panelist at the emerging voices workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Conference on Asian-American Women. She has been a featured reader at KGB and at the Persian Arts Festival’s Shab-e Sher at Bowery Poetry Club.

Her current project is a collection of personal essays and poems titled Carry the Sand Away from the Walls about her experiences with her families in America and in Iran. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College and travels annually to Iran.

www.manijehnasrabadi.com

Massud Alemi

Massud Alemi - writer and author Massud Alemi’s debut novel, entitled Interruptions, was published in January 2008. Interruptions is about a young man accused of conspiring to overthrow the Islamic theocracy in Iran. He is jailed and threatened with harsher treatment unless he reveals his reasons for crossing path with an anti-government rally in Tehran. Although the novel is set in post-revolutionary Iran, it flashbacks to tell a love story set in the 1950s. Thematically speaking, it is about the many interruptions that happen in our lives, which inform who we are; the paths we take in our daily existence and the decisions we make that determine whom we become.

Massud lives in the suburbs of Washington D.C. and is a founding member of DC Area Screenwriters group. His earlier short stories and essays appeared in Iranian.com. He is currently busy working on his next project.

For more information about Interruptions and to contact Massud Alemi, log on to www.massudalemi.com

Parissa Ebrahimzadeh

Parissa Ebrahimzadeh - fiction and non-fiction writer Parissa Ebrahimzadeh is a fiction and nonfiction writer born in Tehran, Iran and raised in California. She completed her undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Comparative Literature with a Minor in Mathematics from the University of California, Irvine. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. She has enjoyed writing fellowships at Squaw Valley, Napa Valley and the VONA writers conferences. Her non fiction can be found in MELUS, Pier2Pier and The San Clemente Journal. She is currently living in northern California and is at work on a novel.

Siamak Vossoughi

I am an Iranian-American writer born in Tehran, raised in Washington state, and now living in San Francisco. I write fiction, mostly short stories, but I am interested in writing novels as well and I have written one novella that I am hoping to publish. I have stories published on www.iranian.com and www.konchmagazine.com. I graduated from the University of Washington and I work part-time at Presidio Hill School.

Zohreh (Zoe) Ghahremani

Born in Iran, Zohreh (Zoe) Ghahremani studied dentistry there and specialized in pediatric at London University. A lifelong writer and poet, for almost three decades she practiced dentistry, taught at Northwestern University, while writing on the side. After relocating to California in 2000, she became a full-time writer.

Her first book, Shareek-e-gham, in Persian, was published in the US. Her work has appeared in several Persian-American publications, including Persian Heritage, Rahavard, Payame Ashna, and Peyk. She has been a long-term writer for Iranian.com, where over one hundred of her articles are featured. She was recently published in the September issue of The Writer Magazine.

A past board member of the San Diego Writers & Editors Guild, Zohreh is on the advisory board of the San Diego Writers Ink and remains an active part of her writing community. She is the recipient of several awards, including two from SDBA, three from Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and The California Stories. She also received The 2008 Ink Well Award from SDWI.

Zohreh has completed three literary novels in English and is currently being represented in NY for publication. When not writing, she enjoys painting.

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