Sounds like an ideal candidate for HUM grant, esp if we can get another dept involved. Cathy
-----Original Message-----
From: "Goodman, Eric" <[log in to unmask]>
Sender: Miami University Creative Writing Faculty <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:01:32
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Miami University Creative Writing Faculty
<[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: INQUIRING about giving a talk/reading from my memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS-Nahid Rachlin
I would certainly consider her as well, especially as I'm hoping/planning to
be teaching the Graduate Issues Course as a creative nonfiction workshop.
It's been several years since that has occurred, and we have a cnf student
(and maybe two) in the grad program.
On 8/29/11 4:57 PM, "Schloss, David Mr." <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Eric,
>
> I would certainly want to seriously consider inviting her next academic year.
> She sounds fascinating, and the people who endorse her work are very
> impressive to me.
>
> David
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Miami University Creative Writing Faculty [[log in to unmask]]
> On Behalf Of Schloss, David Mr. [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 5:47 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: INQUIRING about giving a talk/reading from my memoir, PERSIAN
> GIRLS-Nahid Rachlin
>
> Thanks, Eric
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Miami University Creative Writing Faculty [[log in to unmask]]
> On Behalf Of Goodman, Eric [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 4:26 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: FW: INQUIRING about giving a talk/reading from my memoir, PERSIAN
> GIRLS-Nahid Rachlin
>
> Fyi
>
> I've already written to say that I think we're pretty much full up for this
> year.......
>
>
> Eric
>
>
> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: Nahid Rachlin <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:52:27 -0400
> To: "Goodman, Eric" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: INQUIRING about giving a talk/reading from my memoir, PERSIAN
> GIRLS-Nahid Rachlin
>
> Dear Professor Goodman, I am writing to find out if you would be interested
> in inviting me to give a talk-reading from my memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS or from
> my fiction in your program when you have an opening. I attended Columbia
> University MFA program on a Double-Columbia Fellowship and then went to
> Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. My publication include,
> several novels, among them, FOREIGNER (Norton), and a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS
> (Penguin.) One of my short stories was produced by Symphony Space, as part
> of their "Selected Shorts," series, and was aired on NPRs, "selected
> shorts" around the country. I have also been granted a Pen Syndicated
> project award and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. **There is a
> long interview with me in the May/summer 2008 issue of AWP Writers
> Chronicle. For more please click on my website: http://www.nahidrachlin.com
> (212) 9963478
> ***
> Excerpts from Reviews:
>
> About PERSIAN GIRLS:
> National Public Radio: The World
> Christopher Merrill, the Director of Iowa International Writing Program: "If
> you want to know what it was like to grow up in Iran this is the book to
> read. The prospects of her becoming a writer were, at best, dim. But her
> portrait of the artist in an Islamic country on the verge of dramatic change
> is filled with light."
>
> Publishers Weekly:
> "This lyrical and disturbing memoir by the author of four novels (Foreigner
> , etc.) tells the story of an Iranian girl growing up in a culture where,
> despite the Westernizing reforms of the Shah, women had little power or
> autonomy... Exuding the melancholy of an outsider, this memoir gives
> American readers rare insight into Iranians' ambivalence toward the United
> States, the desire for American freedom clashing with resentment of American
> hegemony."
>
> Boston Globe:
> "Persian Girls, reads like a novel -- suspenseful, vivid, heartbreaking. In
> "Persian Girls, Rachlin chronicles her choices and those made by her
> sisters, her mother and her aunts, throwing the door to her family's home
> wide open. Readers who follow her through will be wiser, and moved."
>
> The Charlotte Observer:
> "Iran again looms large on the world stage. Rhetoric conjures fear of
> radical Islam and flashbacks to the Ayatollah Khomeini-- images that obscure
> Iran's rich cultural history as Persia and ignore ordinary people torn
> between old and new, secular and sacred. In her bittersweet memoir, Persian
> Girls, Iranian American novelist Nahid Rachlin fills in the blanks."
>
> About JUMPING OVER FIRE:
>
> "If, as Aristotle reminds us, we are our desire, then who are we if the
> object of our desire is forbidden? What becomes of us if we are born in one
> world yet long for another? These are just two of the complex and difficult
> questions Nahid Rachlin explores and ultimately illuminates in this brave,
> engrossing, and timely novel. I recommend it highly!"
> --Andre (Dubus III),author of House of Sand and Fog, and In the Bedroom
>
> ³This poignant, beautifully told story of an Iranian-American family is both
> a great read and a fine introduction to a land and a culture about which it
> is imperative we Americans inform ourselves as much and as quickly as
> possible.²
> ‹ Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind and For Rouenna.
>
> About FOREIGNER:
>
> New York Times Book Review:
> "... a rare intimate look at Iranians who are poorer and less educated... I
> have read (this book) four times by now, and each time I have discovered
> new layers in it. The voice is cool and pure. Bleak is the right word, if
> you will understand that bleakness can have a startling beauty."
> -- Anne Tyler, NY Times Book Review
>
> "... an accomplished Iranian novel... FOREIGNER avoids political comment.
> Its protest is more oblique, the political constriction drives the passion
> deeper, and the novel with all its air of innocence, is a novel of
> violation, helplessness and defeat."
> -- V.S. Naipaul, from Among the Believers
>
> About MARRIED TO A STRANGER:
>
> New York Times Book Review:
> "The ecstasies and disillusionments of first love are the stuff of great
> tragedies and cheap romances but Nahid Rachlin has done something else with
> this familiar theme, and something more, though her style is elegantly
> simple... Miss Rachlin shows us not only the tranquil inner courtyards with
> sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked bridal
> chamber, but also the political, social and religious factions contending
> for primacy in the streets outside... Minou is a dreamy literary girl...
> like other yearning heroines from Dorothea Brooke to Emma Bovary, she wants
> more than conventional marriage..."-- New York Times book Review
>
> "MARRIED TO A STRANGER seems to me such a clear statement and all of one
> pieces-- a direct cry, as it were, from out of a particular feminine
> sensibility. Reading the book, one feels one knows what it is like to be a
> girl growing up to be a woman in urban, 'modern' Iran; and knows it not from
> the outside, as from a sociological survey, but from within a living
> experience... Nahid Rachlin has refined her prose... by giving it the
> clarity and spare sensuousness of Persian poetry or miniature painting."
> -- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
>
> About VEILS:
>
> "... The commonalities of life, wherever it's lived, shine through in these
> tales of family friendship, love, and war... They are stories of strength
> and endurance that continually remind us how fragile our outer shells can
> be, how deeply love can be felt, and how strong the influence of home is,
> wherever home may be."
> -- 500 Great Books by Women, A Reader's Guide, Penguin Books
>
> About THE HEART'S DESIRE:
>
> "What is remarkable about THE HEART'S DESIRE is its even-handedness and
> painful honesty. Rachlin's characters face each other across a gulf of
> irreconcilable differences, but she shows them to us with their complexity
> and dignity intact, their deepest needs as recognizable to our own. In the
> end, though, Iran is the major character in this novel. By the time we've
> finished confronting it from very diverse perspectives, each beautifully
> evoked, we have experienced the potent spell it casts over its people, and
> the weight of that spell fora Western woman." -- Rosellen Brown
>
> "Nahid Rachlin has written an intimate family study that is, simultaneously,
> an exploration of cultures, nations, worlds. Her willingness to be
> vulnerable to such powerful feeling, and her ability to pass it along to us,
> make THE HEART'S DESIRE a profoundly moving experience."
> -- Frederick Busch
>
> -- Kirkus Reviews:
> "... offers an affecting portrait of the irreconcilable conflict between the
> familiar and the foreign... A perceptive account, in polished prose..."
> -- Kirkus Review
>
> ------ End of Forwarded Message
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