Laleh Khadivi was born in Esfahan, Iran, on the eve of the Islamic Revolution. Since leaving Iran she has lived in cities around the globe. Her debut novel, The Age of Orphans, received the Whiting Award for Fiction, the Barnes and Nobles Discover New Writers Award, and an Emory Fiction Fellowship. The Age of Orphans is the first book in a trilogy that follows three generations of Kurdish and Kurdish American men and their experiences of home, exile, and migration in the 20th and 21st centuries. The second book of the trilogy, The Walking, was recently published. Her work has been translated into eight languages.
Khadivi’s debut documentary film, 900 WOMEN, aired on A&E and premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Her media projects have received support and awards from the Paul Robeson Foundation, the Soros Open Society Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has worked as director, producer, and cinematographer of documentary films since 1999. Since 2006 she has taught creative writing at The University of Wisconsin, Madison, Emory University, Santa Clara University, and in private workshops.
She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on the third book of the trilogy that takes place in the near future and the distant past.
Patricia Glass will read “Wanderlust” by Laleh Khadivi. She has been involved in dramas, comedies, musicals, voice-overs, staged readings, and storytelling for more than thirty years; locally for the past eleven. She was most recently seen performing as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker at the Woodland Opera House. Glass earned a BA in Theatre from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and has worked at UC Davis for the past fourteen years.
Kathryn Williams lives in Davis and taught English at UC Davis before retiring three years ago. She is currently writing Trail’s End, a collection of interconnected short stories. These stories revolve around a group of elderly denizens in a down-at-the-heels trailer park near Vero Beach, Florida. Three of the stories have been published in the Blue Moon Literary Review. Williams also received Honorable Mention in the Sacramento Library Writing Contest.
Phillip Larrea will read “Three, Four, Knock at the Door” by Kathryn Williams. He was a staple actor around the Sacramento/Davis area who performed at all the college and university venues, as well as a regular member of the ensemble for the Stagedoor Comedy Playhouse. He performed professionally both in New York, and in repertory along the East Coast for a decade or so. Now he enjoys performing his own poetry, and is delighted whenever he is given the opportunity to read great work from other writers. Larrea is the author of two books, We the People (Cold River Press) and Our Patch (Writing Knights Press), and is the editor of the annual Sacramento Voices anthology of prose and poetry, based on his monthly reading series.
