This week we welcome Roger Sedarat as our guest blogger. Roger is the author of two poetry collections, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio UP’s 2007 Hollis Summers’ Prize (David Lehman, judge), and Ghazal Games (Ohio UP, 2011) as well as the academic study, New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian View (Cambria, 2011). His translations of classical and modern Persian poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as World Literature Today, Drunken Boat, roger: an art and literary magazine, and Dirty Goat. He has received a St. Botolph Poetry Grant and scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Under the name of Haji, he performs poetry as well as translation, relating his hybrid Iranian-American identity to the politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program, as well as Poetics and Middle Eastern-American literature in the English department, at Queens College, City University of New York. Find out more about Roger here.
-- sdh
