Porochista Khakpour Biography

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area.

Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) was a New York Times "Editor's Choice," Chicago Tribune "Fall's Best," and 2007 California Book Award winner. It also made the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing shortlist, the Dylan Thomas Prize long list, the Believer Book Award longlist, and many others.

Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a Kirkus Best Book of 2014, a Buzzfeed Best Fiction Book of 2014, an NPR Best Book of 2014, one of Buzzfeed's 28 Best Books By Women in 2014, an Electric Literature Best Book of 2014, a Volume1 Brooklyn Favorite Book of 2014, a PopMatters Best Book of 2014, one of Refinery29's 2015 Books to Read in 2015, and one of Largehearted Boy's 11 Favorite Novels of 2014. It was also one of Flavorwire's 15 "Most Anticipated Books of 2014," io9.com's "Mind-Blowing Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Watch Out For in 2015," The Millions "Most Anticipated" in their "The Great 2014 Book Preview," Flavorwire's "50 Excellent Fabulist Novels Everyone Should Read," and the Huffington Post's "30 Books You NEED to Read in 2014."

Her other writing (essays, features, reviews, cover stories, and columns) have appeared in or are forthcoming in Harper's, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Bookforum, Al Jazeera America, Vice, GQ, The Paris Review Daily, Elle, Spin, Slate, Salon, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Guernica, Departures, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, Bidoun, Alef, Canteen, nerve.com, FiveChapters.com, Granta.com, Newyorker.com, and many other magazines and newspapers around the world.

She has taught creative writing and literature at Bard College (where she was Writer-in-Residence from 2014-2017), Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Wesleyan University, Sarah Lawrence College, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Hofstra University, Fordham University, Bucknell University, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Fairfield University's MFA program, the University of Leipzig (where she was a Picador Guest Professor), the Bruce High Quality Foundation, and the Gotham Writers Workshop. She is currently faculty at the Stonecoast low-residency MFA and the Vermont College of Fine Arts full-residency MFA.

Her first memoir SICK was published by the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins (June, 5 2018): "a memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery, chronicling the long, arduous discovery of her late-stage Lyme Disease."

In 2020, the Vintage imprint of Knopf Doubleday will publish her first collection of essays, Brown Album; in 2022, the Pantheon imprint of Knopf Doubleday will publish her third novel Tehrangeles.

She currently lives in New York City.

Porochista Khakpour's website

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