AIAW Member Profiles -- (Z)

Katayoon Zandvakili's collection of poetry, Deer Table Legs, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series prize, and the book's title poem was awarded a Pushcart Prize.

Her work has been anthologized—American Poetry: The Next Generation, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans, Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, The Poetry of Iranian Women, and In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself, Volume 8—and published in journals such as Lumina, caesura, Five Fingers Review, Rattapallax, Arte East, Private Photo Review, and narrativemagazine.com.

Katayoon's latest projects include My Beautiful Impostor: A Memoir of Persia and Lies, a new volume of poetry, the novel How My Manners Almost Killed Me and the script Everyday Eternal.

Katayoon is honored to serve on the MFA Advisory Board at St. Mary's College and to be a member of the Iranian-American Writers Association. Of Persian heritage, she considers herself a global citizen. She is also a painter.


Facebook Page
Katayoon's Blog
Katayoon's Art
Katayoon.net
Video: Katayoon Zandvakili at Beyond Baroque

Born and raised in Shiraz, at sixteen Bobak Zonnoor moved to California to pursue his education in the field of neurobiology and medicine. After graduating from University of California, he started doing research at Columbia University. Currently, he lives in New York City.

At fourteen, he began his journey into literature by reading Albert Camus's Stranger. The works of Sepehri, Hedayat, Shaw, Sartre, Chekhov and Dostoevsky subsequently inspired him to pursue literature along with medicine.

At age twenty, his first collection of poetry and short stories, Four-Sided Solitude, was published by Shiraz University Press. He is currently working on three different projects including his new collection of short stories and poetry as well as a novel.

Besides writing, he works as a translator. He has translated works of various American and British writers, including William Butler Yeats and Vladimir Nabakov, and is currently working on translating a collection of New York Stories from New Yorker Magazine, titled Shahr-e Ziba.


Photography: bobzny.tumblr.com