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Special Event Added! Book Launch and Signing of New PEN Anthology, Strange Times, My Dear
Only One Week Left to Second Conference on Iranian Diaspora!
IAAB to Announce Launch of New Project at Conference

Special Event: Book Launch and Signing
Reception, 3:30 - 5:30 p.m., Sunday April 23, 2005

PEN American Center has just published Strange Times, My Dear: an Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (Arcade Publishing: New York, 2005), the first work of its kind in about 30 years. The book features the works of twenty-two fiction writers and twenty poets writing today, both in Iran and as expatriate writers, and is designed to highlight the perilous and precarious situation Iranian writers and poets have faced and continue to face since the revolution of 1978-81.

Iranian Alliances Across Borders is pleased to host this special event where the book’s editors, Dr. Nahid Mozaffari (general editor) and Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak (poetry editor) will be accompanied by some of the most prominent contributors to the book, including Ms. Goli Taraqqi, Mr. Nasim Khaksar, Ms. Roya Hakakian, and Ms. Niloufar Talebi.

The panel will feature short presentations by the editors and brief remarks and readings by the authors present. The book launch and signing that follows will provide a unique opportunity to purchase and have the book signed by both editors and several of the writers featured in this important landmark work.

Only One Week Left to Second Conference on Iranian Diaspora!

As IAAB continues to grow, we are beginning to expand our projects throughout the globe and across our various borders. This weekend we are officially launching our next project which will be a traveling exhibition of Iranian artwork throughout Europe and America. This project aims to be the largest exhibition of contemporary Iranian artists in Europe and the United States to have ever taken place. The exhibition will bring together cartoonists, dramatists, film makers, painters, poets, photographers, from Iran and the diaspora who express what Iran, and more concretely, what their identities mean to them.

Through culture and the arts, the organizers look to bring together a wide array of works which seeks to reflect a more human and 'real' picture of what it means to be Iranian in today's heightened political atmosphere. The art will explore, among other themes:

a) how Iranians have reacted to the images that represent them in Western media;

b) what the political upheavals of the past 26 years have meant in the lives of the younger generation who have grown-up within Iran; and

c) the links that second-generation Iranians in the diaspora have to Iran and what role it has played in their identity-formation.

To learn more about the project and how to become involved, please join us at the Second International Conference on the Iranian Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park on April 23-24, 2005 where it will officially be launched.

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