Featured Speakers

 

Playwright, author and film critic Ezzat Goushegir received her M.F.A from the Theater Department of the University of Iowa. She has published four books in Farsi, including  two collections of short stories (“The Woman, the Room, and Love,” “And Suddenly the Leopard Cried: WOMAN”), a collection of two plays (“Metamorphosis” and Maryam’s Pregnancy”) and ”Migration in the Sun,” a book of poetry. Her plays, including “Bride of the Acacias” (about Forough Farrokhzad), have been produced by a variety of theater companies in the U.S. ”Maryam’s Pregnancy” won a Richard Maibaum Award and “Behind the Curtains” a Norman Felton Award. Goushegir’s play "Medea Was Born in Fallujah" was published in Witness 2006. In 1990 she was a Writing Fellow in the Iowa City International Writing Program; in 1992 she contributed in the Second Conference of International Women’s Playwrights in Canada; and in 2007 she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Maryland. She teaches at DePaul University in Chicago.

Michael Hillmann is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of A Lonely Woman, a biography of Forough Farrokhzad.

Farzaneh Milani is the author of "Veils and Words: The Emerging Voice of Iranian Women Writers" and co-author of "A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems of Simin Behbahani.” She has served as the guest editor of two special issues of "Nimeye Digar on Simin Daneshvar and Simin Behbahani. Milani has written over 60 articles, book chapters, introductions, and afterwards in Persian and English and lectured at over 100 colleges and universities nationally and internationally. Her poems have been published in "Nimeye Digar," "Par," "Barrayand," "Daneshju," "Omid," and "Avaye Portland." Currently, she is Director of Studies in Women and Gender and Professor of Persian and Women Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She teaches courses in Persian literature and cinema, Islam, and cross-cultural studies of women. Professor Milani received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

Sholeh Wolpé is the author of Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, and two volumes of poetry, The Scar Saloon and Rooftops of Tehran. She is the associate editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Literature from the Muslim World and thecoeditor of Iconoclasts and Visionaries. Her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide, and have been translated into several languages. Sholeh was born in Iran but spent most of her teen years in the Caribbean and Europe before ending up in the U.S. She lives in Los Angeles.