Iranian-American novelist Porochista Khakpour is set to read from her works at Labyrinth Books.
Khakpour and four seniors in Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University are set to participate in the first Emerging Writers Reading Series event. The series showcases senior thesis students of the Program in Creative Writing with established writers as special guests.
The reading is scheduled for 6 p.m. Sept. 19 at the bookstore, 122 Nassau St., Princeton.
Khakpour’s debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects was named a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” Chicago Tribune “Fall’s Best,” and received a 2007 California Book Award. She has also penned the introduction to a new English edition of the modern Iranian novel The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat.
Her second novel, The Last Illusion, published earlier this year, was named one of Flavorwire’s “15 Most Anticipated Books of 2014,” The Millions’ “Most Anticipated” in its “The Great 2014 Book Review,” and the Huffington Post’s “30 Books You NEED to Read in 2014.”
She has been awarded fellowships from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Yaddo. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she received a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing.
Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the greater Los Angeles area. She has taught creative writing and literature at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Hofstra University, Fordham University, Bucknell University, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Fairfield University’s M.F.A. program, the University of Leipzig, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, and the Gotham Writers Workshop. She is currently Writer in Residence at Bard College and Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City.
The four seniors, who are pursuing a certificate in Creative Writing in addition to their major areas of study, will read from their senior thesis projects. Each is currently working on a novel, screenplay, or collection of short stories as part of a creative thesis for their certificate with a member of the Creative Writing faculty including Jeffrey Eugenides, A.M. Homes, Chang-rae Lee, and Joyce Carol Oates.
More information is online at arts.princeton.edu.
Porochista Khakpour,
