[EVENT] Book Talk | Tehrangeles by Porochista Khakpour

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Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley. Her debut novel Sons and Other FlammableObjects (Grove, 2007) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Her second novel The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more.  Her widely acclaimed third book Sick: A Memoir (Harper Perennial, 2018) was a Best Book of 2018 according to TIME, Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, The Paris Review, LitHub, and more. Her essay collection Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity (Vintage, May 2020), has been praised in The New York Times, O: Oprah Magazine, TIME, goop, USA Today, and many more. 

Her most recent book, Tehrangeles: A Novel,  came out in June 2024 (Pantheon), and was an Indie Next Pick, an NPR Book of the Day, one of TIME's 25 Most Anticipated Books of 2024, as well as one of the "Best Books of 2024 (So Far)" by Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, W, and more. 

Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her other writing has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, Slate, and many others. She has taught creative writing and literature at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Bucknell University, Bard College, Wesleyan University, Sarah Lawrence College, Fordham University, the University of Leipzig, and more for the past 20 years. She is a contributing editor at Evergreen Review and lives in NYC. For more info: www.porochistakhakpour.com

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Chiwan Choi is the author of 5 books of poetry: The Flood (2010), the Daughter trilogy—Abductions (2012), The Yellow House (2017) and my name is wolf (2020)—and Sky Songs (2024).

He wrote, presented, and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015, as part of his ongoing examination on the meaning of a book and the impermanence of physical objects.

Chiwan was a librettist in the one-of-a-kind opera Songs & Dances from Imaginary Lands, produced by Overtone Industries inside an abandoned car dealership.

Chiwan is also a founding member of the experimental independent press and community publishing laboratory Writ Large Projects, based in Pittsburgh, PA and Los Angeles, CA, and part of the NEW INC Y11 cohort at the New Museum in New York, NY. He is also the producer and host of a paranormal literary podcast, Are You There, Ghost? It’s Me, Chiwan.