Alireza Shilesar holds a bachelor’s degree in Acting and a master’s degree in Dramatic Literature. He has written 15 plays so far, most of which he has directed and staged himself. His most recent work in Iran was the play “Nakhoda Khanom”, which…

Jaffer Sheyholislami is Professor in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies, Carleton University. He conducts research in Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, critical discourse analysis, language policy and planning, and applied linguistics. Skills and Expertise.

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani and Bengali-American poet, vocalist, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), winner of the 2017 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What…

Irene Monique Salehi was born in 1954 in Paris. She studied art in Paris, Tehran, and Canada, and now lives in Toronto with over thirty years of experience in silk painting. Since 1998, she has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada…

A former Postdoctoral Fellow with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, Duman Riyazi ‘s research interests include artefacts and manuscript documents of the commedia dell’arte, the theatrical relationship between East and West, the history of Persian theatre and Persian comedy. He…

M. Rezaei Tazik was born in July 1983 in Mashhad. He graduated with degrees in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from the Universities of Lucerne and Berne in Switzerland. His master’s and doctoral studies focused on the history of intellectual thought…

Saeid Rezadoust, a researcher, writer, and poet, was born in 1985 in Neyshabur, Iran. A graduate in law, he has amassed years of professional experience working and writing in the fields of literature, law, and interdisciplinary topics. His background in journalism and…

Kaveh Oveisi, a graduate in dramatic literature, embarked on his writing journey in 1998 with the short story “Arash,” which garnered recognition at the Isfahan Students’ Story Festival. He furthered his artistic endeavors by delving into the creation of short films and…

Hossein Noushazar (born 1963) is an Iranian writer, translator, and journalist. He emigrated from Iran in the late 1980s and spent many years in Germany, where he pursued academic studies and worked in healthcare and psychiatric institutions—initially as a nurse and later as…

Partow Nooriala was born in Iran into a distinguished literary family in which poetry was both inheritance and destiny. Her two grandfathers, her mother, and her eldest brother were all poets and literary figures, and from adolescence she found herself immersed in…

Mansour Noorbakhsh is a poet, writer, and translator, creating works in both English and Persian (Farsi), his native language. His writings advocate for freedom, human rights, and environmental awareness. He believes that dialogue between people across the world is essential for fostering peace,…

Mahboubeh Mousavi, a former teacher, is a writer and literary researcher from Neyshabur. She studied history at university, and her first literary activity was the publication of a children’s story adapted from the “Zal and Simorgh” tale in the Shahnameh, titled A Bird,…

Merila Moradi, born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1981, is a graphic designer, sculptor and writer. She began her writing journey at the age of seventeen through short story workshops in Shiraz, led by Shahriar Mandanipour, and later had her short stories published…

Born in Tehran in 1953, Fereshteh Molavi lived and worked there until 1998 when she immigrated to Canada. She worked and taught at Yale University, University of Toronto, York University, and Seneca College. A fellow at Massey College and a writer-in-residence at…

Shahrzad Mojab is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto. Professor Mojab has served as the Interim Principal…

Mehdi Marashi is an Iranian fiction writer, translator, and researcher based in Canada. He has published three short story collections—Nafas-Tang (“Short of Breath”), Ketābat-e Bahār (“The Writing of Spring”), and Az Jādeh ke Migozashtim (“As We Passed the Road”)—as well as the…

Arash Khoshsafa is an Iranian PhD holder in English literature from the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His main scholarly focus is literary criticism and modern American fiction, especially the works of dirty realism authors such as Richard Ford. In…

Farnaz Khatibi Jafari is a novelist and educator based in Japan. Her work explores identity, memory, and the quiet erosion of the self within systems that demand silence and conformity. Influenced by years of teaching on consciousness and selfhood, she writes fiction…

Yalda M. Kaveh is an assistant professor in Bilingual Education at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Her research, teaching, and service focus on language policy, bi/multilingualism in (im)migrant families, family engagement in education, and culturally sustaining pedagogies.

Bijan Jalali (1927–2000) was an Iranian poet known for his brief, minimalist, meditative style. Departing from traditional Persian verse, his poems focus on the nature of poetic production, the cosmos, and nature. Though overlooked during his lifetime, Jalali’s work has gained posthumous…

Domenico Ingenito, Associate Professor of Iranian Studies at UCLA, specializes in premodern Persian literature, visual culture, and gender studies. His interdisciplinary research integrates philology, literary theory, and manuscript studies, focusing on Persian lyricism. His notable works include Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz…

Professor Amir Hassanpour (1943-2017) was a prominent Kurdish-Iranian Marxist Linguist and Professor Emeritus of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto (UofT), where he taught from 1999 to 2009. His major research areas were Kurdish socio-linguistics, Kurdish history and…

Zohreh Hakimi was born in Iran in 1955. She began writing fiction in the mid-1990s and has since published two short story collections and two novels. Her works have won the Parvin Etesami Literary Award, and she was the runner-up (second-place recipient)…

Amir Hakimi is a poet and a researcher of the history of New Persian poetry and the history of modernity in Iran. Hakimi has played a prominent role in the recovery of less-seen currents in the history of modern Persian poetry. By…