In particular, she was interested in senior greyhounds who were retired racer dogs, who often had trouble finding homes. It was there that she decided it was as good a time as ever to take in a dog. After finishing grad school, Porochista was completing a fellowship year in Baltimore.

Currently, she is Contributing Editor at The Evergreen Review. She has presented at book festivals here and overseas, and served as a judge for various literary awards.īorn in Tehran and raised in the Los Angeles area, she lives in New York City.Porochista Khakpour grew up without having dogs around. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others. It was not always an easy path-I just had to tell myself that one day, being on the periphery would become an asset (and I think it finally has, as a creative adult).” She is also an advocate for those with chronic illness and disability, and speaks frequently on this topic.Īmong her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. I was labeled weird and that tag never left me-all through high school, I was always the oddball. I tried hard to be a convincing American but it was a losing battle. “I remember trying to learn English on kindergarten playgrounds. Being an outsider, for instance, can be like being an observer.” As a child, she was acutely aware of her “resident alien” and Mulsim refugee status. Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was named a 2014 'Best Book of the Year' by NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature and many more.ĭiscussing her view of being a writer in America, Khakpour notes, “I think to really be an artist, to really inhabit that, you have to accept on some level that you are not going to belong. Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove Press, 2008) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Khakpour was called one of Dazed’s “Top American Writers You need to be Reading,” and Open Road Media’s “10 Amazing Female Novelists Under 50.” Her next book is Teherangles, coming from Pantheon in 2023. Porochista Khakpour is the author of four critically acclaimed books, most recently Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Vintage Books, 2020), which Ploughshares called “fearless.” In 2o18 she published the memoir Sick (HarperCollins, 2018), which Kirkus Review praised as “lucid, eloquent, and unflinchingly honest.” Sick was named one of the most anticipated books of 2018 by the Boston Globe, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Electric Literature, Huffington Post, Bitch, The Milions, The Rumpus, Autostraddle and others.

Sick porochista