BIO

Maryam Ala Amjadi is an Iranian writer, translator, and researcher, and currently a City of Asylum Fellow at Black Mountain Institute. She is the author of two poetry collections, a poetry chapbook, and the translator of a selection of Raymond Carver’s poems into Persian. She won the ‘Young Generation Poet’ Prize in the inaugural Yinchuan International Poetry Festival in China and was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her debut short story, “The Ice Seller of Hell” won the 2024 Elizabeth Alexander Award and will be published in the Meridians journal (Duke University Press). Ala Amjadi was previously a writer for the Tehran Times Daily, where she founded and wrote a weekly page dedicated to the socio-cultural nuances of Iran. In 2017, she earned a joint PhD in interdisciplinary literary studies as an Erasmus Mundus fellow from Kent (UK) and Porto (Portugal) universities. Her poems and translations of contemporary Iranian poets have been anthologized internationally, and her poetry has been translated into multiple languages, including Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Marathi. Her most recent book, Where Is the Mouth of That Word? (Selected Poems) was published by Poetrywala in 2022.