Born: 17 January 1978, Iran
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Endowment for the Arts. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in South Pasadena, California. Her critically acclaimed novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove Press, 2008) received the California Book Award in First Fiction. She has been awarded fellowships from the Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Ucross, Djerassi, and Yaddo. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Daily Beast, and Salon, among others. She wrote the introduction to the 2010 English edition of the Iranian novel The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat. Khakpour was also the guest-editor and curator of Guernica’s first Iranian-American issue (2011). She is currently the Picador Guest Professor at the University of Leipzig in Germany and a member of the faculty of Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA.