Persis Karim

Persis Karim was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by her French mother, Evelyne M. Karim and her late Iranian father, Alexander Karim. She grew up feeling a little �different� and spent a good deal of her childhood explaining an identity she couldn�t fully grasp. During the 1979 hostage crisis, she had a kind of awakening. After graduating from college at UC Santa Cruz, she felt an immense longing to learn more about her Iranian heritage. In the early 1980s she began learning Persian and got involved with a group of Iranian expatriates who were working to raise American awareness about the Iran-Iraq War. As the 1980s wore on, she felt a longing to become more familiar with Persian language and literature as well as the politics of the Middle East. In 1990 (on the eve of Perisan Gulf War I), she started graduate work at the University of Texas in Middle Eastern Studies. She followed her master�s degree, with a Ph.D. in comparative literature.

She is currently an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at San Jose State University where she teaches literature and creative writing. She has published her poetry in numerous literary journals including Reed Magazine, Alimentum, Di-Verse-City, HeartLodge, and Caesura. She is the author of numerous articles on Iranian American literature and the editor of the anthology “Let Me Tell You Where I�ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora” University of Arkansas Press. She is also co-editor and co-author of “A World Between: Poems Short Stories and Essays by Iranian Americans” (1999). She is currently working on a collection of essays, “In the Belly of the Great Satan: Art, Literature and the Emergence of Iranian American Identity”. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and her two beautiful sons.

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Endorsements

“Since the Iranian revolution, writing by women from both inside and outside Iran has become the most interesting writing by Iranians. Women in Iran are challenged by their society to write, and those outside are driven to it by their inner needs. Here, on the dividing line between past and future, memory and desire underlie the experience of exile and a new becoming. Memory links the writers to childhood, foods, and relations within extended families in Iran, but desire drives them to find or forge a new identity in a new culture. Perceptive readers will also find unsettling views of the US that will challenge complacency. - W. L. Hanaway, emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

�Might this be the perfect moment for bridges of language and sensibility- delicious humanity- to define and connect us? Gratitude to Persis Karim for this healing tonic of pomegranate wisdom and pleasure.� - Naomi Shihab Nye, Poet and Author

�In these tender and not-so-tender pages you�ll find the barely tellable story of what really happened to dreams deferred. Through the vivid, sometimes spellbinding accounts they provide, these gifted writers speak powerfully to the subject of displacement.� - Al Young, Poet Laureate of California, from the Foreword

�This is a surprising collection… Persis Karim has located a community of sensitive and articulate cultural observers and mapped that explosion of creativity for us.� - Michael Beard, coeditor of Middle Eastern Literatures and author of Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition

�[These writings] command our attention, not only for the range of their subject matter and literary artistry, but for representing a multiplicity of voices, the newest patch in this quilt of American culture. They are allegories of our enriched nation. . . . the real thing.� - Zohreh T. Sullivan, author

�We have to thank Persis Karim for this wonderful book and for these powerful selections; they offer an alternative to the currently politicized and one-sided view of Iran and Iranian culture.� - Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

�Iran is a land of paradoxes. It is also undergoing a momentous and profound transformation. The delightfully diverse group of women assembled in this important and timely collection offers a panoramic view of these complex and dynamic changes. Persis Karim ought to be congratulated.� - Farzaneh Milani, author