Press Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Growing Up Jewish in Post-revolutionary Iran

(WORCESTER – September 2, 2005) Roya Hakakian, author of Journey from the Land of No, will be speaking at 11 a.m., Thursday, September 8, 2005 in the Student Center Auditorium at Worcester State College.  The memoir of her growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran received Elle magazine’s Winner of 2004 Non Fiction Award, Publishers Weekly’s "Best Books of 2004, non-fiction," and Ms. Magazines’ "Must Read" book of the season.

Hakakian is the author of two highly acclaimed collections of poetry, the first of which, For the Sake of Water, received honorable mention in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World and was nominated as the poetry book of the year by Iran News in 1993. She writes for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, and the Weekly Forward, and is a contributor to NPR's Weekend Edition.

Most recently, Hakakian was the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and the 2003 Dewitt / Wallace Reader's Digest Fellowship in writing. She is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

An excerpt from a review by The Washington Times states, "That this was not an easy story to tell, the author makes clear.  Finally, though, a colleague's astute questions and her own instincts as a journalist prompted her to tell her story, to bear witness to what she experienced, and to do so, not in Persian, the language that 'could summon the teenager at sea,' but in English, which had 'sheltered the adult survivor, safely inside a lighthouse.'"

This event is sponsored by the Diversity Office and the Third World Alliance student organization.  For more information call 508-929-8117.