W2W – Writers to Watch
Mehrnoosh Mazarei was born and raised in Iran. She moved to Southern California in November 1979. Ms. Mazarei co-founded and co-edited Forough, the first Persian magazine dedicated to women's literature, between 1989 and 1991. She has published four short story collections in Persian and a novel in English. A Stranger in My Room, a collection of her selected short stories, published in Iran in 2004, has been nominated twice for best first book of short stories. The title story, A Stranger in My Bed, was reviewed as an outstanding Modernist story in the text book, “Short Story in Iran.” Another story, Sangam, was selected and anthologized as one of the ten best short stories published in that year. Although Mernoosh’s books are now banned from publishing in Iran due to the feminist and political content of them, her short stories have been praised by critiques and scholars and have been categorized as distinguished modernist and feminist stories written in Farsi. Mazarei’s stories have been published in Narrative Magazine (USA), The Literary Review (USA), Eighty years Iranian Short Story (Iran), West Cost Line (Canada), Alef today (Syria), Roadside Curiosities: Stories About American Pop Culture (Leipzig), The Short Stories of the Word (Turkey ), and most recently in Alaalem, Iraqi Daily Newspaper (Iraq) and Gaab Gaosayn (Jordan). Her novel, Mina’s Revolution, is a historical saga set in Iran and the US. The story covers the life of an Iranian-American woman, before, during, and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran through to the morning of Sept. 11, 2001