Description:

The critically acclaimed novelist Porochista Khakpour will be a Visiting Writer-in-Residence with the Center for the Writing Arts (CWA) and the Middle East and North African Studies Program (MENA) from September 27 through October 15, 2017.

She is the author of two award-winning novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) and The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014), and a forthcoming memoir titled Sick, to be published by HarperCollins in May 2018.

In addition to her novels, Khakpour’s essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Salon, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Bidoun, Granta, and many other publications.

Her essay “How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay,” published in May 2017 at Catapult, has garnered significant attention in the past month since it was published. The essay can be found here:

https://catapult.co/stories/how-to-write-iranian-america

MENA director Brian Edwards will conduct a conversation with Khakpour about the essay and other themes.

Khakpour's residency at Northwestern will feature a series of fiction-writing workshops, literary readings and public conversations. For more information:

http://www.mena.northwestern.edu/documents/porochista-khakpour-coming-to-northwestern-as-visiting-writer-in-residence.html