Soraya Shalforoosh - This Version of Earth

In Conversation with Persis Karim 

This Version of Earth begins with the voice of the hippest, wisest teenager you can imagine, stuck in New Jersey but heading for Manhattan every chance she gets. Gradually, her world enlarges and we learn about the experiences that shape her: her Iranian-American family and other people’s blinkered, bigoted reactions to it, her parents’ separation and her encounters with careless threatening men. These themes rest quietly within Soraya Shalforoosh’s uniquely charming poems, where office friendships, births, marriages, and deaths take place in this poets thrilling imagination.

Soraya Shalforoosh has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series and has had poems and reviews in Tribes.org, Good Foot, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, Skanky Possum, Bomb Magazine, Marlboro Review, WSQ, Can We Have Our Ball Back.com, Shampoo Poetry, Brink: An Anthology of Post Modern American Poetry, Four Corners, Salonika, etc.  Soraya has her MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and as an undergraduate at Clark University, won first place in the Prentiss Cheney Hoyt Poetry award. Shalforoosh has been a Writer in Residence at William Paterson University in NJ, a guest poet at Berkeley College in New York and a guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria. 

Location: 

1 Ferry Building
San Francisco, CA 94111