Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies, San Francisco State University in collaboration with Diaspora Arts Connection proudly presents a virtual reading of "My Shadow Is My Skin, Voices from the Iranian Diaspora," edited by Katherine Whitney and Leila Emery.
The event features readings by Katherine Whitney, Iraj Isaac Rahmim, Leila Emery, and Shideh Etaat and will be moderated by Persis Karim. Through more than thirty essays, My Shadow Is My Skin presents a broad, personal, and inclusive view of the Iranian diaspora in the US and reveals the intricate ways in which the diaspora continues to evolve.
This is a free event and is open to public, but please register by sending an email to Iraniandiasporastudies@sfsu.edu to receive the Zoom link via email.
About the Readers
Katherine Whitney: Katherine Whitney was drawn into the Iranian diaspora through marriage. After a transformative experience in the Iranian Identity writing workshop taught by Persis Karim and Anita Amirrezvani, she contributed to and co-edited the anthology My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press 2020.) She lives and writes in Berkeley, CA.
Excerpt From Katherine's Writing: “I’m American, like Mommy,” Kian declared with confidence. “Besides, what kind of Iranian doesn’t even speak Farsi?” This was an echo of conversations Leyla had been having for years with her father. She desperately wanted him to teach her Farsi, but for reasons he couldn’t really explain to her, he resisted. The sole card-carrying, 100 percent Iranian in the family didn’t seem all that interested in transmitting his culture to his kids, at least not overtly. Along the way, it had become my job.
Iraj Isaac Rahmim: Iraj Isaac Rahmim’s essays and fiction have appeared in the Antioch Review, Commentary, Commonweal, Fugue, Guernica, Gulf Coast, the Houston Chronicle, the Missouri Review, Reason, Rosebud, and Zócalo Public Square, and have been broadcast by Pacifica Radio. He was selected as a MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Herzliya Artists’ Residence, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Texas Commission of the Arts Fellow, was a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar, and was twice winner of First Prize in Prose from Fugue. His writing has been selected six times as a Notable Essay by the Best American series, was nominated twice for and received a Special Mention from the Pushcart Prize, and was nominated by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for Best New American Voices. Winner of the San Miguel Writers’ Conference Fiction Contest, Isaac also holds a PhD in biochemical engineering from Columbia University.
Excerpt From Iraj's Writing: Shortly after my new girlfriend, Debbie, took me to meet her parents, I sat locked in their apartment with her stepfather, Jack, holding a knife to my neck. We were in the living room, Jack with his leather-handled army knife and I, staring at each other and listening to my girlfriend and her mother, now locked out, fist-banging on the door. They sounded scared: “Jack, please don’t hurt him.”
Leila Emery: Leila Emery's work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Parentheses Journal, Matter, and Lines + Stars. Her poem "How Do You Say That in Farsi?" was nominated for Sundress Publication's Best of the Net anthology. She is a graduate of Smith College and holds a M.A. in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University.
Excerpt From Leila's Writing:
"I think of the mirror on our Nowruz haft sin shining brightly on my mother’s face as she smiles down at me, ready to welcome a new year with small cloud-like cookies. I think of the Farsi I’m starting to learn after all these years, the weave of its lyrical curves around my ears like the curl of a cat’s tail—soft, nearly imperceptible. I think of sitting on Persian carpets given to us by my bababozorg, their reds and browns slightly faded, as I wait for stories of jumping over fire."
Shideh Etaat: Shideh Etaat is a Los Angeles based Writer, Educator, and Self Love Advocate. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. An excerpt from her novel can be found in Tremors, New Fiction by Iranian Americans, and she has published short stories in Day One and Foglifter. Her memoir piece “Forget Me Not” can be found in My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora. She is a 2015 James D. Phelan Award recipient and her first novel is about grief, Tupac, and an Iranian American teenager exploring her love for girls in the 90’s. She is also working on a memoir about how her life changed when her husband sustained a traumatic brain injury while she was three months pregnant.
Excerpt From Shideh's Writing:
Everyone has a different version of my grandmother. Mine goes like this: She loves me deeply, but she’s also jealous of me. She holds me in her lap when I’m a child, lets me pull on her pearls, and, when I’m thirteen, tells me the most important thing in life is love. She also becomes anxious and depressed easily and wants all my mom’s attention, and so for a little while, I hate her for that. I watch her take too many pills, and dramatically beat on her own chest when she’s upset with my grandfather, but I also watch her start her life over in a new country and grow curious about my life, wanting to know whether I have a boyfriend, whether I’ve ever loved someone, making sure I know that she didn’t really love my grandfather like that, as they were first cousins. That she missed out on a romantic kind of love. A person is never one thing, and my grandmother is many, but I doubt anyone sees her the way I see her—equal love, equal pain.
Persis Karim: Persis Karim is poet and editor and professor of World & Comparative Literature at San Francisco State University and she holds the Neda Nobari Endowed Chair and serves as director of the newly-established Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals including: Callaloo, Reed Magazine, The Raven's Perch, and The New York Times. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature and is glad to be tending to her own poetry manuscript, Accidental Architecture, which was selected a finalist for the Catamaran Review Prize in June 2019. She can be found at: www.persiskarim.com.
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