KGB Bar

“Voices of Iranian Women” will feature readings by two Iranian exile writers, who represent a particularly energetic and creative national diaspora, although one that remains, as a group, largely hidden from sight. The evening will feature novelist and memorialist Nahid Rachlin and playwright Ezzat Goushegir. Rachlin, who has lived in the US since the 60s, will read from her memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS, of the anguished struggle she went through breaking out of oppressive cultural roles, forcing her ultimately to leave her country for the US. Goushegir, who arrived as a political exile in 1986, will present her entire one-act play “My Name Is Inanna,” which dramatizes the irony of one who has left post-revolutionary Iran seeking political asylum in the US, only to find herself arrested and shackled here during an anti-war demonstration.

NAHID RACHLIN’s publications include a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin, “suspenseful, vivid, and heartbreaking"--Boston Globe), four novels, JUMPING OVER FIRE (City Lights), FOREIGNER (W.W. Norton), MARRIED TO A STRANGER (E.P.Dutton), THE HEART’S DESIRE (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, VEILS (City Lights). Her individual short stories have appeared in about fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, Shenandoah. She has written reviews for New Times and Newsday. She has held Doubleday-Columbia fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). The grants and awards she has received include, the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.  http://www.nahidrachlin.com.

EZZAT GOUSHEGIR has published four books in Farsi, including two collections of short stories THE WOMAN, THE ROOM AND LOVE and AND SUDDENLY THE LEOPARD CRIED: WOMAN, a collection of two plays “METAMORPHOSIS and MARYAM’S PREGNANCY, and MIGRATION IN THE SUN, a book of poetry. Two of her plays MEDEA WAS BORN IN FALLUJAH and NOW SMILE were anthologized in Witness and Crawdad in 2006. A number of her plays have been produced in the US since she emigrated here in 1986. Among them MARYAM’S PREGNANCY won a Richard Maibaum Award and BEHIND THE CURTAINS received a Norman Felton Award. Currently she teaches creative writing and cultural studies at DePaul University in
Chicago. http://www.ezzatgoushegir.com.