AIAW Member Profiles -- (E)

Taha Ebrahimi's award-winning writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Seattle Times, RIVET Magazine, Elan Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction (Norton, 2008) and is forthcoming in Love and Pomegranates: New Voices Celebrating Iran.

She has been in residence at both Hedgebrook and the Millay Colony for the Arts, where she was also on the jury in 2008. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh where she taught writing for three years. Originally from Seattle, Washington, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

Mahru Elahi is a writer and zine-maker living in San Francisco. She has taught literary arts for a decade. Her students have included teachers, emerging adult writers, elementary school-age children, continuation high school youth, incarcerated juvenile offenders, minimum-security prisoners and youngsters at a public middle school in New York City.

An alumna of the Voices of Our Nations Writing Workshop, and a recipient of a 2006 Hedgebrook Residency, Mahru earned her BA in American Studies from UC Santa Cruz and her MS in Teaching from New School University. Her writing has appeared in magazines, journals, and the anthology Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (University of Arkansas Press, ed. Persis Karim). She is author of a graphic novel, The Thorn Garden (EROS Comix).

Mahru has served on the faculty of the Intergenerational Writers Lab, a writer’s workshop co-sponsored by three organizations with deep roots in San Francisco: Intersection for the Arts, Kearny Street Workshop and Galería de la Raza. She is currently employed by the San Francisco Unified School District as a Literacy Specialist, and coordinates the After-School Program at Sanchez Elementary School.

Mahru began making and illustrating her own books in the third grade. In the 1980’s, she discovered do-it-yourself magazines (a.k.a zines). Mahru later began a love affair with comic books, including a stint as an intern for Milestone Media, a groundbreaking publisher of comic books by and for people of color. She loves to draw and is addicted to Sharpie fumes. Her website - www.kidpersia.com - showcases her most recent self-published work, Blame It On Pluto. In addition, several pages of her zine Riding Rough Roads Really Slow will be showcased in a forthcoming 2009 City Lights Anthology.


www.kidpersia.com

Iranian-American author Elizabeth Eslami was born in South Carolina in 1978. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from over a dozen literary journals, including G.W. Review, Bat City Review, Minnesota Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.

Her first novel, Bone Worship, about the complex relationship between an Iranian father and his Iranian-American daughter, has been called “a treasure” by author David Haynes and “unpredictable at every turn” by Joan Silber. Author Janet Peery called Eslami a writer of “uncommon wit and depth” .

Elizabeth Eslami lives in Oregon and is at work on her second novel.

Ellen Estilai received a BA in Art from the University of California at Davis and an MA in English Language and Literature from the University of Tehran. While living in Tehran from 1971 to 1980, she taught English at National University and the University of Tehran. She also served as the Manager of Educational Services for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

A return visit to Iran in 2006 convinced her that she had a story to tell. She is currently at work on a memoir of her years in Iran. Her essay, "Front Yard Fruit," originally published in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, is included in New California Writing 2011 (Heyday). Ellen serves on the board of the Inlandia Institute, a non-profit literary center celebrating inland Southern California in word, image and sound.

Shideh Etaat is an Iranian American writer, currently attending San Francisco State’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Poetry being her first love, she attempts to weave the precision and movement of this art form into her fiction and non-fiction work, while making her narratives accessible through the unexpected humor of every day life.

Her articles have been published in The Santa Barbara Independent, Javanan Magazine and she was also a semi-finalist of the 2009 Movie Script Awards. She is currently hard at work on a collection of poems, a novel and a feature length screenplay.