Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area.
She has been awarded fellowships from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Yaddo. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is most recently the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Prose).
Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 9/07)–a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” Chicago Tribune “Fall’s Best,” and 2007 California Book Award winner–is out in paperback. She has also penned the introduction to a new English edition of one of the greatest modern Iranian novels of all time, Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (10/10).
She was also invited to be the guest-editor and curator of Guernica‘s first Iranian-American issue, which came out in November 2011.
Her other writing (essays, features, reviews, cover stories, and columns) have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, The Paris Review Daily, Granta.com, Salon, Poets and Writers, The Rumpus, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, Bidoun, Alef, Canteen, nerve.com, FiveChapters.com, and many other magazines and newspapers around the world. As of 2008, she’s been a frequent contributor of personal essays to the New York Times.
She has given talks, lectures, and readings at festivals, universities, conventions, and conferences all over the country, from a keynote speech at the University of Cincinnati’s Rope Lecture Series to the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series.
She has taught creative writing and literature at Johns Hopkins University, Hofstra University, Bucknell University, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Fairfield University’s MFA program, and the Gotham Writers Workshop. Additionally, she has been guest faculty at Cleveland State University’s Imagination Conference and the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. She is currently core faculty at the University of Tampa’s low residency MFA.
She has been awarded a Picador Guest Professorship (based on a partnership between the Veranstaltungsforum der Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, the DAAD, and the University of Leipzig) for October 2011-March 2012.
You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.
photo by George Stilabower