Description:

The critically acclaimed novelist and essayist Porochista Khakpour will explore how, after a decades of writing about Iranian-American identity, she realized she had yet another marginal identifier that needed examination: that of the chronically ill. In her forthcoming memoir Sick, she looks at illness and addiction additionally through the lens of a woman of color and dissects how that can complicate the narratives of the body and mind in dysfunction.

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 other publications.

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

There will be a reception following the program.