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Contributors
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C O N T R I B U T O R S AZIN AREFI was born in Iran and moved to the United States when she was eleven years old.She studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and received her master’s in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction at UC Davis.She currently teaches English literature and composition at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Her fiction has appeared in a number of publications, including the online magazine Iranian.com. GELAREH ASAYESH moved to the United States with her family just before the Iranian revolution. She is the author of Saffron Sky:A Life Between Iran andAmerica (Beacon Press,).She has worked as a journalist for the Miami Herald and the Baltimore Sun and contributes articles and commentaries to such publications as the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the St. Petersburg Times, as well as National Public Radio. She lives in Florida with her family. SUSAN ATEFAT-PECKHAM was born to Iranian immigrants in New York City in and lived there until her father’s work with the United Nations necessitated the family’s move to Switzerland. She returned to the United States to study medicine before turning to poetry in the early s. She was the National Poetry Series Award winner, and her book That Kind of Sleep was published in by Coffee House Press. Though initially and primarily a lyric-narrative poet and essayist whose work was driven by story and character,her later poems were influenced by Rumi’s mystical lyricism in particular and Sufi mysticism in general. The ⁄ attacks and the resulting American backlash against the Middle Eastern world led Atefat-Peckham to poignant dissatisfaction with American foreign policy, spurring her to become a more public voice and to teach at the University of Jordan in Amman on the Fulbright program. On February , , she and her oldest son, Cyrus AtefatPeckham , were killed in an auto accident on a highway near the Dead Sea.The Soul LivesThere,In the Silent Breath, a posthumous collection of her poetry, will be published by Coffee House Press in . TARA BAHRAMPOUR is the author of the memoir To See and See Again:A Life in Iran andAmerica (Farrar,Straus and Giroux,),which traces her family’s migration from Iran to the United States after the CONTRIBUTORS 339 revolution and her own journey back to Iran fifteen years later. She has written about Iranians in global limbo for the NewYorker, the NewYorkTimes, theAmerican Scholar, the New Republic, and other journals . She is a staff writer at theWashington Post. LAYLA DOWLATSHAHI graduated from UC Berkeley and received her MFA from Goddard College.Her play Joys of Lipstick was staged at the Producer’s Club and had a reading at the Lark Play Development Center; Waiting Room had a staged reading at the Annenberg Studio Theatre at the University of Pennsylvania. Both these plays will be published by Temple University Press. She has also written two pulp fiction novels.She teaches writing at the City University of NewYork. FIROOZEH DUMAS moved from Abadan,Iran,toWhittier,California, with her family when she was seven. She is the author of Funny in Farsi:A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (Villard Books, ), which was selected as a finalist for the PEN award in the creative nonfiction category. She is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio and is currently touring California with her one-woman show, “LaughingWithout an Accent.”She lives in Northern California with her husband and two children. MAHRU ELAHI, the daughter of an Iranian father and an American mother, grew up in California. After many years of teaching in New York public schools,she returned to California in .She is currently an artist-in-residence withWritersCorps,a project of the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is particularly proud of her work with incarcerated women.Her poetry has appeared in the Canadian feminist journal Fireweed. She is the author or TheThorn Garden, a graphic novel. On paper and legally perhaps,PARINAZ ELEISH could be categorized as an Iranian American. In reality, she is seeking a new identity that is neither American (which she has not yet become) nor Iranian (which she no longer is in the purest sense). She wrestles with her identity as a poet and the image her children have of her as a mother.And so she travels on paper in search of this identity.She loves writing travel poems and searches the world...