This conversation between novelist and essayist Porochista Khakpour and literary scholar Brian Edwards took place on October 9, 2017, at Northwestern University. Khakpour was a Visiting Writer-in-Residence with the Center for the Writing Arts and the Middle East and North African Studies Program from September 27 through October 15, 2017. She is the author of two award-winning novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) and The Last Illusion (2014), and the forthcoming memoir Sick. Khakpour’s essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Salon, Guernica, and Granta, among other publications. The point of departure for this conversation was Khakpour’s May 2017 essay “How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay.”
Brian Edwards is Director of the Middle East and North African Studies Program, Crown Professor in Middle East Studies, and Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (2016) and Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (2005), and co-editor, with Dilip Gaonkar, of Globalizing American Studies (2010).
Porochista Khakpour is the author of two award-winning novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) and The Last Illusion(2014), and the forthcoming memoir Sick. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Salon, Guernica, Bidoun, Granta, and other publications. She was a Visiting Writer-in- Residence with the Center for the Writing Arts and the Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern University September 27 - October 15, 2017.