Porochista Khakpour was born in 1978 in Tehran and is an Iranian-American novelist, essayist and writer.
Porochista was born in Tehran and was raised in South Pasadena, California and the Los Angeles area. Khakpour attended Sarah Lawrence College in New York for her BA, majoring in Creative Writing and Literature. She received her MA from Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. After receiving her MA, she was a Lecturer and an Eliot Coleman fellow at Johns Hopkins University.
Khakpour was an arts and entertainment journalist early in her career. Her writing has appeared or will be forthcoming in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, The Daily Beast, The Chicago Reader and multiple other publications. She has also been a frequent contributor of personal essays to The New York Times since 2008.
Her first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, was published in September 2007. The lyrical dark comedy, centered on the aftermath of 9/11and Iranian fathers and sons in Los Angeles and New York, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and was included on the Chicago Tribune’s 2007 “Fall’s Best” list. It won the 77th annual California Book Award prize in First Fiction. This book also won the 77th annual California Book Award “First Fiction” prize.
Khakpour’s second novel is entitled The Last Illusion and will be released on May 13, 2014.
Khakpour is a recipient of the 2012 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Prose).
Khakpour currently teaches at Columbia University in New York as an Adjunct Faculty Member in the MFA program, and at Fordham University as an Adjunct Faculty member.
