Maryam ala Amjadi

Born in Tehran (1984) and having spent the impressionable years of her childhood in India, Maryam Ala Amjadi is the author of two poetry collections Me, I and Myself (2003) and Gypsy Bullets (2010), and a poetry chapbook Without Metaphors (2017). Ala Amjadi received the ‘Young Generation Poet’ Award in the First International Poetry Festival in Yinchuan, China (2011) and was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa, UNESCO City of Literature (2008). She was also the winner of the Silver Medal in the 14^th National Persian Literature Olympiad (2001). Ala Amjadi has worked as a Farsi-to-English translator at the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) and was previously a writer for the Tehran Times Daily, where she founded and wrote a weekly page, dedicated to the representation of the nuances of Iranian culture and society for the English-reading world. In 2017, she earned a joint PhD degree in literary and cultural studies as an Erasmus Mundus fellow from the University of Kent (UK) and Universidade do Porto (Portugal). Ala Amjadi’s poems and translations of contemporary Iranian poets have been anthologized internationally and appeared in publications such as the Poet Lore, Atlanta Review, Weeping Willow Books, and The Mongrel Book of Voices. In July 2022, she participated in the 32^nd International Poetry Festival of Medellín. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Albanian, Chinese, Hindi, Italian, Marathi, Romanian, and Spanish.