Stories are everywhere: a notion perhaps too airy to be true, but little by little when ideas come down from the sky and words reach up for them, they greet each other as friends.

I was born in Tehran and grew up in London, Orange County, and Seattle, eventually moving to San Francisco in part because of the way William Saroyan described the city in his stories.

My stories have been published in many journals, and my first short story collection, Better Than War, was published September, 2015. It received a 2014 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. My second collection, A Sense of the Whole, received the 2019 Orison Fiction Prize and will come out in November 2020

As an Iranian-American writer, I figure it is my job to write with love for Iranians and Americans. It’s a lonely business but I wouldn’t trade it.