Pegah Ahmadi Was Born in Tehran in 1974. She Is the Author of Three

Pegah Ahmadi was born in Tehran in 1974. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, On the Ending G, Cadence, and These Days of Mine Are A Throat, an interweaving of modern Farsi and ancient Persian, in which she explores the history of cruelty against women in Iran, criticizing the Islamic religion and its influence on Iran’s social-political situation, published in 2002. That same year, she also published a translation of poetry by Sylvia Plath entitled Mad Girl’s Love Song, and collected, edited, introduced and published an anthology gathering the work of Iranian women poets, both historical and contemporary. Shortly after, she was banned from publishing poetry in her home country, except, in a limited manner, through online venues run by exiled Iranian writers. In 2009, following her involvement in the Green Movement’s demonstrations against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, she was threatened with imprisonment, and left Iran with the assistance of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), which placed her as a guest writer in the city-of-refuge site in Frankfurt, Germany. During her years in Frankfurt her long unpublished book, I Was Not Cold, translated into German by Jutta Himmelreich, was published by Sujet Verlag in Berlin. Ahmadi is in residence at Brown for the 2011-12 academic year. Born in Tehran in 1938, Bahram Beyzaie is a well known Iranian critic, researcher, teacher, playwright, stage director (and producer), screenwriter and filmmaker (director, producer and editor) who has written more than 35 plays and more than 50 screenplays, including feature films Downpour, The Stranger and The Fog, The Crowd, Death of Yazdgerd, and Bashu, the Little Stranger. His work has been widely translated, and was first introduced to western audiences when he was 25, through a production of his work at the Festival du Theater des Nations in Paris, 1963. Professor and Chair of the Dramatic Arts Department at Tehran University until the Islamic revolution, he is at present a visiting professor at Stanford University’s Iranian Studies Program, where he lectures on such topics as Iranian Cinema, Iranian Theater, and Cinema and Mythology. Joumana Haddad is a renowned Lebanese poet, translator, and journalist. She is head of the Cultural pages for the prestigious "An Nahar" newspaper, as well as the editor-in-chief of Jasad Magazine, a controversial Arabic magazine specializing in the literature and arts of the body. She has published several poetry collections, widely acclaimed by critics, including original books in Italian, English, French and Spanish, in addition to Arabic. She has also published several works of translation, including an anthology of 150 poets who committed suicide in the 20th century. Her most recent publication, an essay on Arab women entitled “I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman,” (Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago), has been translated to 13 languages. The sequel, “Superman is an Arab: On God, Marriage, Macho Men and Other Disastrous Inventions,” will appear in September 2012. Masha Hamilton is the author of four acclaimed novels, most recently 31 Hours, which the Washington Post called one of the best novels of 2009 and independent bookstores named an Indie choice. She also founded two world literacy projects, the Camel Book Drive and the Afghan Women's Writing Project. She is the winner of the 2010 Women's National Book Association award, presented "to a living American woman who derives part or all of her income from books and allied arts, and who has done meritorious work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation." She began her career as a full-time journalist, working in Maine, Indiana and New York City before being sent by the Associated Press to the Middle East, where she was news editor for five years, including the period of the first intefadeh, and then moving to Moscow, where she worked for five years during the collapse of Communism, reporting for the Los Angeles Times and NBC-Mutual Radio and writing a monthly column, "Postcards from Moscow." She also reported from Kenya in 2006, and from Afghanistan in 2004 and 2008. Sara Khalili is an editor and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. Her translations include Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Prison Memoir. She was awarded the 2007 PEN Translation Fund Award for her translation of Seasons of Purgatory, a collection of short stories by Mandanipour. Her short story translations have appeared in The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Words Without Borders, PEN AMerica, and the anthology Bound to Last. She has also translated several collections of poetry, among them The Sorrow of Solitude, Poems of Forough Farrokhzad; My Country, I Shall Build You Again, Poems of Simin Behbahani; As Red as Fire Tasting of SMoke, Selected Poems of Siavash Kasraii. Sara was also a contributing translator to Strange Times My Dear: A PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. Ron Leshem is an author and scriptwriter whose novel, Beaufort, was the recipient of the 2006 Sapir Prize, Israel’s top literary award. Widely translated, Beaufort was released in English by Random House in 2008. The film version of the novel, which Leshem coauthored, was nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won the Berlin International Film F estival Silver Bear for Best Director. Beaufort has been hailed – not only by critics but by the generation of soldiers who served in Lebanon during Israeli occupation – as the true voice of that period. Leshem has served as journalist and senior editor for Israeli dailies Yedioth Ahronoth and Ma'ariv. In 2006 he became deputy director for content and programming for Channel 2, Israel's main commercial TV network. Abbas Milani is the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a Professor (by courtesy) in Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies. He has been one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Till 1986, he taught at Tehran University's Faculty of Law and Political Science where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university's Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was for fourteen years the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University. For eight years, he was a visiting Research Fellow in University of California, Berkeley's Middle East Center. Professor Milani came to Stanford ten years ago where he has been the founding director of the Iranian Studies Program. He also worked with two colleagues to launch the Iran Demcoracy Project at the Hoover Institution. He has published more than twenty books and two hundred articles and book reviews in scholarly magazines, journals, and newspapers. Amongst his books, are Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (in Persian, Gardon Press, 1998); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution ( in both Persian and English, Mage, 2000; Akhtaran, 2001); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran (Mage 2004); King of Shadows ( in Persian, Ketob Corp. 2004); The Myth of the Great Satan (Hoover Institution Press, 2010); Eminent Persians, two volumes (Syracuse University Press). His latest book is The Shah (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English. His articles have been published in journals, magazines, and newspapers including The Washington Quarterly, the Encyclopedia Iranica, the Hoover Digest, Iranshenasi, the Journal of the Middle East, Middle East Journal, the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement. His work has been translated into Persian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Pashtun and Arabic. He has won numerous grants, teaching awards and Fellowships and has on numerous occasions appeared on major news and opinion programs here in America and around the world. Sheida Mohamadi, poet and fiction writer, was born in Tehran, Iran. She is the author of three books, a work of lyrical prose, Mahtab Delash ra Goshud, Banu! (The Moonlight Opened its Heart, Lady!); a novel, Afsaneh-ye Baba Leila (The Legend of Baba Leila); and a collection of poems, Aks-e Fowri-ye Eshqbazi (The Snapshot of Lovemaking). A new collection of her poems, Yavashhaye GherMez (Crimson Whispers) is currently in press. She was Poet in Residence at University of Maryland in 2010. Her poems have been translated into different languages, including English, French, Turkish, Kurdish and Swedish. Shahriar Mandanipour is the author of nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than 100 essays in genre such as literary theory, literature and art criticism, creative writing, censorship, and social commentary. His collections of short stories include The Eighth Day of the Earth, Violet Orient, Midday Moon,MuMMy and Honey, Shadows of the Cave, and UltraMarine Blue. He is the author of the two-volume novel, The Courage of Love. From 1999 until 2007, he was Editor-in-Chief of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal published in Shiraz that after nine years of publishing was banned by Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. His first novel to appear in English, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, translated by Sara Khalili and published by Knopf in 2009, was well received. The New Yorker named it as one of the reviewers’ favorites of 2009, and NPR named it one of the best debut novels of the year. Censoring An Iranian Love Story is also being translated and published in 11 other languages in countries throughout the world.

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