Porochista Khakpour


Porochista Khakpour is an Iranian American novelist and writer.

Early life

Born in Tehran, Iran, Khakpour was raised in South Pasadena, California and the Los Angeles area, graduating from South Pasadena High School. Khakpour attended Sarah Lawrence College in New York for her BA, majoring in Creative Writing and Literature. She received her MA from Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. After receiving her MA, she was a Lecturer and an Eliot Coleman fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

Career

Her first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects was published in September 2007. Khakpour's second novel, The Last Illusion, was released on May 13, 2014.
Khakpour has taught at Hofstra University as an Adjunct Professor and at the College of Santa Fe. She was also a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University, and the Picador Guest Professor of Literature at the University of Leipzig in Leipzig, Germany. She has also been a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University. and Northwestern University.
In 2018, she published Sick, a "memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery." The Week magazine selected the memoir as 'Book of the week' in June, 2018.
In 2019, she published Parsnips in Love, a critically acclaimed soft erotica novel.
In May 2020, Penguin Random House published Brown Album, a collection of essays, "chronicling immigrant and Iranian-American life in our contemporary moment."

Awards and accolades

Khakpour is a recipient of the 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing. Khakpour has also received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Northwestern University, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ucross Foundation, Yaddo and Djerassi. Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Khakpour's first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects also won the 77th annual California Book Award "First Fiction" prize. The novel was also a New York Times Editor's Choice and included on the Chicago Tribune's 2007 "Fall's Best" list. The novel was also shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and longlisted for the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize.

Works