Join Farhang Foundation at

America's Largest Annual Book Festival

and Learn about

Iran Through Books

We will be at booth #949

April 26-27, 2025

SAT 10am - 6pm

SUN 10am- 5pm

at the

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

at USC

This event is FREE and open to all!

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– Guest Author Appearances –

About Dr. Houri Berberian

Houri Berberian is Professor of History, Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies, and Director of the Center for Armenian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on late nineteenth/early twentieth-century transimperial Armenian history, especially revolutionary movements and women and gender. Her books include Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 (2001), the multiple award-winning Roving Revolutionaries (2019), and The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity (2025).

About Dr. Talinn Grigor

Talinn Grigor is professor and chair of the Art History Program in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century art and architectural histories through the framework of postcolonial and critical theories, grounded in Iran and Parsi India.

Her books include Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs (2009); Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (2014); and The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture (2021).

About Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. She has been awarded fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, VCCA, Civitella Ranieri, Sewanee Writers Conference, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, and more. Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” Chicago Tribune “Fall’s Best,” and the 2007 California Book Award winner in “First Fiction.” Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a Kirkus Best Book of 2014, a Buzzfeed Best Fiction Book of 2014, an NPR Best Book of 2014, an Electric Literature Best Book of 2014, and more. Her memoir SICK (HarperPerennial, 2018) was a Best Book of 2018 according to TIME, Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, The Paris Review, LitHub, and more. In 2020, the Vintage imprint of Knopf Doubleday published her collection of essays, Brown Album, to all starred pre-pub reviews and much acclaim. Their Pantheon imprint published her third novel Tehrangeles in June 2024. The novel 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, Vanity Fair, and more. She lives in New York City, where she is a contributing editor at The Evergreen Review.

About Abdi Nazemian

Abdi Nazemian is the author of five novels including Like a Love Story, a Stonewall Honor book, and The Chandler Legacies. His latest novel, Only This Beautiful Moment, was the 2024 Stonewall Award Winner from the American Library Association. For his literary work, he has also received a Lambda Literary Award. His screenwriting credits include movies such as The Artist's Wife and The Quiet, and television shows including Ordinary Joe. He has been a producer, executive producer or associate producer on a number of films, including Call Me By Your Name and Little Woods. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, their two children, and their dog Disco..

About Omid Roustaei

Omid Roustaei is a trained chef, culinary instructor, and newly published cookbook author with a passion for Persian and global cuisines. Based in Seattle, he has taught thousands of hours of cooking classes at venues like The Pantry, The Book Larder, and Milk Street Cooking School, sharing both traditional Iranian recipes and creative global dishes. In 2025, he fulfilled a lifelong dream by publishing his first cookbook—a deeply personal collection that weaves together recipes and stories from his culinary journey.

About Mandana Zandian

Mandana Zandian is a poet, writer, and physician born in Isfahan, Iran. She studied medicine in Iran and is a member of the writing team of Rahavard quarterly journal. Her work includes a decade of writing and hosting the radio program The Voice of Contemporary Poetry in collaboration with Homa Sarshar, as well as 20 years of cancer research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

She has published seven poetry collections, the latest being Our Voice Echoed the Shadows of All. Zandian also documents the professional lives of exiled Iranian cultural figures through interviews, with books such as Hope and Liberty (with Iraj Gorgin), Ehsan Yarshater in Conversation with Mandana Zandian, and The Persian Cypress and the Blooms of Modernity (with Abbas Milani).

A selection of Zandian’s love poems has been translated into English by Professor Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak under the title An Eyeful of Earth, An Eyeful of Ocean.

Her latest book, The Sunbird, explores the history and impact of the “Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults” (known as Kanun). It features a series of interviews with Lily Amirarjomand and 23 other figures involved in the institute.