Mandana Chaffa is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters that will launch in spring 2021, an Assistant Managing Editor at Split/Lip Press and a Daily Editor at Chicago Review of Books. Her essay “1,916 Days” is in My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, (University of Texas Press, 2020) and she edited Roshi Rouzbehani’s limited-edition illustrated biography collection, 50 Inspiring Iranian Women (2020). Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in the Ploughshares Blog, Chicago Review of Books, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Asymptote, Rain Taxi, Jacket2, The Adroit Journal and elsewhere. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.
For centuries, one of the roles of the poet has been as oracle, acting as witness, interpreter and seer about societies and individuals. Poetry serves to illuminate, even if—especially […]