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Contributor

Zara Houshmand

Contributor

Zara Houshmand

Zara Houshmand is an Iranian-American writer who was raised in the Philippines and received her BA in English Literature from London University. Her most recent book is A Mirror Garden (A. A. Knopf, 2007), co-authored with Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. Her poetry has been published in the anthologies Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been (University of Arkansas Press, 2006) and A World Between (George Braziller, 1999) and in journals including Caesura, Persian Book Review, West Coast Line, Di-verse-city, and Texas Observer. Her play The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be was produced at the Burbage Theatre in Los Angeles (1986). Her translations from the Persian received the first commissioning grant from the National Theatre Translation Fund, and have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Literature from the Axis of Evil (New Press, 2006), Words Without Borders (Anchor, 2007) and Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (Arcade, 2006). As editor for the Mind and Life Institute, she has been responsible for a series of books representing a longterm dialogue between Buddhism and Western science. She has also pioneered the development of virtual reality as an art form; her installation Beyond Manzanar (with Tamiko Thiel), now in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, has been widely discussed in works on new media and critical theory.

Articles by Zara Houshmand

Sunshine in the Closet
By Granaz Moussavi
They’ve come!Glasses               flee down the hatchGirls               into the tiny flowers of their scarvesThe…
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand
Marked by the Moon: An Ancient Tale
By Nasser Yousefi
That's why Moon-Fairy climbed slowly and carefully into the well. Come what may, she had to get the dress.
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand
Iran in Theater
By Zara Houshmand
In the wake of Sept. 11, the ta'ziyeh themes—of martyrdom, doomed battle against impossible odds, and the slaughter of innocents—might be expected to offer some insight into the alien psyche of Islam.
Elegy
By Ahmad Shamlou
And so we repeat the round / of night and day
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand
Learn
A couple at the tomb of the poet Hafez.
By Adam Jones. License: CC BY 2.0.
The Fish
By Ahmad Shamlou
I think my heart has never been / like this / so warm and red.
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand
Learn
From “The Eighth Voyage of Sindbad”
By Bahram Beyzaii
We are going to seek happiness for you and your children. All of us! Because one hand alone is useless. Are you ready?
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand & Bella Warda
From “The Moon and the Leopard”
By Bijan Mofid
Why should I give up the light that I've held?
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand
From “Snow over Tehran”
By Firouz Nadji-Ghazvini
“Your eyes are full of sadness, friend.”
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand
Existence
By Ahmad Shamlou
If this is life—how pure!
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand
Iran as Cinema
By Salar Abdoh
Why are so many of us going back? More precisely, why are so many going back to make films?
Translated from Persian by Zara Houshmand