AIAW Member Profiles -- (A)

Salar's last novel was Opium.

Camron recently competed in the 2009 New York City Triathlon. He dedicated this endurance race to citizens of Iran fighting for their voices to be heard and seeking to regain their power.

Dena Afrasiabi was born in Shiraz, Iran and moved to California with her family when she was two. She received her B.A. in English from UCLA in 2005 and is currently a second-year MFA student in fiction at Rutgers-Newark University.

Much of her writing stems from the desire to create a bridge between the two cultures in which she grew up and to cultivate a space for better understanding what it means to be Iranian American.

Behzad Afshar-Naseri was born in Tehran, raised in Minnesota and has lived in New Orleans, LA and Naples, FL since.

Behzad is currently finishing up his undergraduate degree at Florida Gulf Coast University with a major in English and a minor in Philosophy. He is the poetry editor at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Mangrove Review and has published poetry in Augsburg College’s ECHO Newspaper and the Mangrove Review.

Behzad is also working with Dr. Brad Busbee on a study of Arab and Persian literature that describes first-hand accounts of Scandinavian peoples in the Middle East and Iberian Peninsula during the 8th and 9th centuries C.E.

Behzad is currently seeking a teaching position in the Greater New Orleans area.

Massud Alemi's debut novel, entitled Interruptions, was published in January 2008. Interruptions is about the personal fallout of large scale political events and how an ordinary person is ensnared in a scheme of larger ideological conflicts. It is also a tale about how insignificant choices can often lead to monumental consequences, in particular the futility of the individual in the context of a political juggernaut.

Massud's short stories have been translated into Arabic, and his screenplays were shortlisted at Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

His screenplays have made it to semi-final at the BlueCat Screenwriting Competition and quarter-final at the Scriptapalooza International Screenplay Competition.

Massud lives in the suburbs of Washington D.C. and is a founding member of DC Area Screenwriters group.

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

Anita Amirrezvani is the author of The Blood of Flowers, published by Little, Brown & Co. in 2007. This novel, which was called “enduring and dynamic” by the Washington Post and “hypnotic” by the San Francisco Chronicle, has been sold to publishers in more than thirty countries. It was longlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize in the UK and shortlisted for the 2008 Boeke Prize in South Africa.

Anita has been a speaker at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Adelaide Writers’ Week, Book Expo America, the Asia Society, LitQuake and many bookstores and libraries.

Prior to the release of her book, she was a staff writer and dance critic for ten years at the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times. Anita received her B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and is currently working on her second novel.


www.bloodofflowers.com

Katrin Arefy was born in Tehran in 1971 where she lived until she received a bachelor’s degree in Art. She spent six years in Moscow where she received a second bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in piano pedagogy and performance from the Gnessin School of Music.

Her first two publications were were translations from Russian to Farsi; The Art of Piano Playing by Heinrich Neuhaus and First Meet with the Music by Anna Artobolevskaya.

Katrin moved to the United States in 2002 and started Golden Key Piano School in Berkeley. She is working toward publishing her book The Golden Key to Piano, a method book based on the Russian school of piano using Iranian folk and children’s music . Having become interested in literature and passionate about writing, she is now working on her first literary work.