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Humanities Podcasts
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Inaugural Workshop for the Association for Iranian-American Writers
05/03/08 | Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture Hosts a Day-Long Workshop to Inaugurate ASSOCIATION for IRANIAN-AMERICAN WRITERS (AIAW)
May 3, 2008 | 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
9:00 a.m. Introductions and Welcome
Nasrin Rahimieh, Maseeh Chair and Director
Persis Karim, San Jose State University
Opening Address: Gaby Schwab, Chair, Comparative Literature, UCI
9:30-10:30 a.m. Fiction and Representations of Iranian-American Identity
Chaired by Persis Karim, San Jose State University
Gina Nahai, Parissa Ebrahimzadeh, Haleh Hatami
10:30-11:30 a.m. Fiction in the post- 9/11 World
Chaired by Dina al-Kassim, UCI
Porochista Khakpour, Anita Amirrezvani, Majid Amini
1:30-2:15 p.m. Innovations in Self-Representation
Chaired by Annette Schlichter, UCI
Sepideh Saremi, Jahanshah Javid
2:15-3:15 p.m. Writing Poetry
Chaired by Susan Jarratt, UCI
Majid Naficy, Esther Kamkar, Sholeh Wolpé
3:15-4:00 p.m. Politics of Writing
Chaired by Amy DePaul, UCI
Jasmin Darznik, Shireen May
4:00-5:00 p.m. Future Directions
Chaired by David Goldberg, UCI
Ari Siletz, Zara Houshmand, Persis Karim
To Join AIAW and contribute to the new website, please contact Persis Karim, persisk@yahoo.com or Manijeh Nasrabadi, manijeh_nasrabadi@yahoo.com
Majid Amini has authored eight novels: The Greatest Meeting, Escape From Paradise, The Howling Leopard, Dreams of a Native Son, Sunset Drifters, Children of a Lesser Nation, and Bibi’s Wisdom. His screenplays and films include: Uncommon Friends, The Afghan, Concealed Soul, The Greatest Meeting, Joseph’s Sorrow, and Broken Pillars. Majid Amini holds Electronics Engineering degree and a MBA. He is Chairman of the Board Photo Emission Technology, Inc. – a high-tech electronics company.
Anita Amirrezvani was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in San Francisco. She was a dance critic for a decade at newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first novel, The Blood of Flowers, has been sold to publishers in 26 countries and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in the UK. aa@bloodofflowers.com; http://www.bloodofflowers.com/
Jasmin Darznik received her doctorate in English literature from Princeton University in 2007. She has contributed to the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. The recipient 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. The Good Daughter, her memoir of Iran, will be published next year in the U.S. by Grand Central and in the U.K. by Random House.
Parissa Ebrahimzadeh received her undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Irvine in Philosophy and Comparative Literature. Recently, she has obtained her MFA in Fiction from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She focused both her undergraduate and graduate theses on the Iranian Diaspora and its influence on modern Iranian literature. She is currently at work on a novel.
Haleh Hatami’s work appears in journals and anthologies, including Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing from Women in the Iranian Diaspora and in Bay Poetics and was shortlisted for the 2006 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her translations of Yadollah Royai appear in The Kenyon Review and The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. She has taught writing at San Francisco State and Mills College.
Zara Houshmand is an Iranian-American writer, born in the US, who is currently living in Austin, Texas. Her work includes poetry, theatre, literary translation, new media, and editing several books on dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists. Her most recent book is A Mirror Garden, a memoir co-authored with Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.
Jahanshah Javid was born in Abadan, Iran, in 1962. He attended high school in the U.S. and Germany from 1976 to 1980, and returned to Iran after graduation. His journalism career began in 1981 as a translator for the Islamic Republic New Agency (IRNA). In the following decade he became the agency's correspondent in London and the United Nations in New York as well as editor of the English section in Tehran. Javid left Iran in 1990 and permanently settled in the U.S. After receiving a BA in Media Studies from New York's Hunter College in 1995, he launched iranian.com. Javid continued his journalism career as a presenter for Aftab Iranian cable TV network in New York (1994-96) and a correspondent for the BBC Persian Service in Washington DC (1998-2000). Since then he has dedicated himself to running iranian.com full time. Today the site is the largest and most-viewed English-language Iranian online forum for amateur and professional writers and artists.
Esther Kamkar was born in Iran, and has lived in California for the last 25 years. She has been published in a few anthologies, including Let Me Tell you Were I have Been. Hummingbird Conditions is her letterpress book published by a grant from The Peninsula Community Foundation in the Bay Area. She lives and works in Palo Alto.
Persis M. Karim is an associate professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State University where she teaches literature and creative writing. She is editor and contributing poet of Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (University of Arkansas 2006) and co-editor of A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans (1999). She has written numerous articles on literature and the emergence of Iranian-American identity.
persisk@yahoo.com; http://www.persiskarim.com
Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in Pasadena, CA. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA from Johns Hopkins University. Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 9/07) received much acclaim from The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. It won the 2007 California Book Award in First Fiction, and was a Chicago Tribune "Fall's Best" selection and a New York Times "Editor's Choice. She currently teaches at New York's Hofstra University and will be the 2008-2009 Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Bucknell University.
Shireen May’s stories have appeared in Best New American Voices 2008, the Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Story Quarterly, Manoa, Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English, A Stranger Among Us: Tales of Cross-Cultural Collisions and Connections, and elsewhere. She received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University and co-edited In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing from Cambodia. She recently completed a linked story collection.
Majid Naficy fled Iran in 1983 a year and a half after the execution of his wife, Ezzat Tabaiian in Tehran. He has published two collections of poetry, Muddy Shoes (Beyond Baroque Books) and Father and Son (Red Hen Press) as well as his doctoral dissertation, "Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature: A Return to Nature in the Poetry of Nima Yushij" (University Press of America). He is the author of more than 20 books in Persian and the co-editor of the literary journal of Iranian Writers' Association in Exile. majidnaficy@yahoo.com
Gina Nahai is the author of four best-selling novels, and a professor of creative writing at USC's Master of Professional Writing Program. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages. She writes a monthly column for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, and has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Magazine, Huffigntonpost.com, and Truthdig.com.
Sepideh Saremi is a Los Angeles-based writer and Internet professional specializing in online media content. She has a BA in creative writing from USC and created the first interactive-fiction senior honors thesis in the USC English department. Sepideh is the founding editor of ParsArts.com, a culture website that highlights young Iranian hyphenates. http://www.parsarts.com/
Ari Siletz (b. 1953) is an Iranian born short-story writer. Several of the stories from his book The Mullah With No Legs have been anthologized in world literature collections. Though he also studied in England and America as a young adult, much of Sileltz’s writing deals with Iran's past and present, its political and religious upheavals, and its clashes between tradition and modernity.
Sholeh Wolpé is the author of Sin:Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, Rooftops of Tehran, The Scar Saloon, Shame (a play in three acts) and a poetry/music CD (Refuge Studios). She is the associate editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Literature from the Muslim World (Norton, 2009) and her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide. She lives in Los Angeles. http://www.sholehwolpe.com
For More Information contact:
Nasrin Rahimieh, Professor UC Irvine, (949) 824-0406, or
Persis Karim, Professor, San Jose State University, (408) 924-4476,
Press Liaison: Homa Sarshar
This event is co-sponsored by The Levantine Cultural Center. |
Click on a file name to play:
- Inauguration for the Association for Iranian-American Writers, May 3, 2008 - 01-AIAW.mp3
- Inauguration for the Association for Iranian-American Writers, May 3, 2008 - 02-AIAW.mp3
- Inauguration for the Association for Iranian-American Writers, May 3, 2008 - 03-AIAW.mp3
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