Join the CCNY MFA in Creative Writing and The Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts on Tuesday, Nov. 1 at 6:30PM in CCNY’s Shepard Hall, room 350 for the final event in our “Spotlight: Writers on Iran” series with author and MFA of Creative Writing Professor of fiction Salar Abdoh about his latest novel Out of Mesopotamia, in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges.
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A New York Times Editor's Choice selection and Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Out of Mesopotamia is informed by Abdoh’s firsthand experience on the battlefronts of Iraq and Syria. It captures the horror, confusion, and absurdity of combat from a seldom-glimpsed perspective that expands our understanding of the war novel. The story depicts Saleh, a middle-aged Iranian journalist who moonlights as a writer for one of Iran's most popular TV shows, but cannot keep himself away from the front lines in neighboring Iraq and Syria.
Abdoh’s forthcoming book, When a Woman Burns Herself, is due out in September 2023. His previous books include The Poet Game, Opium and Tehran at Twilight, and he edited and translated Tehran Noir.
Cultural critic and author Chris Hedges, who will be moderating the event, was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans for 15 years for The New York Times. A member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The Times’ coverage of global terrorism, he also received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. Hedges holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University, and has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He has been teaching college credit courses through Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system since 2013.
The “Spotlight: Writers on Iran” series has featured award-winning novelists and academicsMikhal Dekel, Dalia Sofer and Amir Ahmadi, all of whose most recent works will be available for purchase at this event.
“Spotlight” is an ongoing series presented by the MFA in Creative Writing which engages public figures in the most pressing conversations of our time, through the lens of literature and the arts.