AIAW Member Profiles -- (F)

Born and raised in Iran, Omid Fallahazad moved to the U.S. in 2001. By then some of his writings had slipped past the censors, most notably his works of fiction and literary critique in AsriPanjshanbeh, the renown literary journal, and a biographical novella of ancient Persian physician, Rhazes. In 2004 his Iran-Iraq war Raftigan story was shortlisted for BaharamSadeghi online contest.

Since moving to Boston in 2001, he has made the transition to writing in English. He has contributed to Paul Revere's Horse, a San Francisco based literary journal, as a writer, translator, and contributing editor.

His first novel in English, So Lifts the Eyelid of Life, tells how a horrific incident on the eve of the Iranian revolution forever altered the lives of three generations of one family; it's when a Bahai major in the Shah's army opened fire on a mob of Muslim revolutionaries in defiance of his faith's most basic tenet, bringing death to himself, shame to his family and untold misery to his minority. The novel was completed in 2010.

Farnaz Fatemi writes both poetry and prose, and is a Lecturer in Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has published poems in a range of journals, magazines and anthologies, including 5 poems in the anthology, Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing By Women of The Iranian Diaspora.

She wrote the libretto for an opera Dreamwalker (composer Lucia Patiño) which was staged and produced at the University of Indiana, Bloomington in 1998 and in other venues since 1998. She is currently at work on both poetry and prose. She has an MFA in poetry from Mills College, CA.

Roia is half-Persian and was born in the United States. The year her family spent in Iran (1970-1971) provided her first memories, and she writes about this in her blog Persianchyld. She is currently a manager at UC Berkeley.

A prose writer, Roia has found that her connection through her mother with Persian language, food, music and poetry is the most profound and influential in her writing. Her short stories grapple with Iranian-American identity formation in the diaspora and the sensation of “otherness” that can be pervasive, especially for those born outside of Iran. She has published on websites such as Iranian.com and Persianmirror.com.

She is currently working on a children’s book. More of her work can be experienced at www.persianchyld.blogspot.com

Sanaz Fotouhi is a PhD candidate completing her thesis on Post-revolutionary Diasporic Iranian Writing in Australia. Sanaz was born in Tehran in the early 80s but was educated and grew up in Japan, the US, and Hong Kong and received her BA and MPhil (submitting a thesis entitled That Other World That Was The World: A Comparative study of the short fictions of Katherine Mansfield and Nadine Gordimer) in English Literature from the University of Hong Kong.

Sanaz's short stories and poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in Hong Kong and Australia, including in Asian Cha, Yuan Yang and Auburn Letters and she has been on the editorial team of many journals and anthologies. In 2008 Sanaz taught a syllabus of the Postgraduate Diploma of Creative Writing at the University of Hong Kong.

Apart from writing, Sanaz has also been involved in film projects. In 2006 she produced a short documentary Hidden Generation about women's self-burning in Afghanistan which won the best theme award at the Noor Film Festival in LA in 2008. Currently she is working as a co-writer on another feature documentary about the situation of Afghan women which is to be shot in mid-2009.
www.sanazfotouhi.com