PEN America Emerging Voices Podcast Episode 012 Parnaz Foroutan

PEN America

In celebration of the launch of her memoir–HOME IS A STRANGER–in the middle of a pandemic, 2009 EV Parnaz Foroutan talks about shaking the self in times of strife, the reckoning required to digest suffering, and falling in love with the people we used to be. ** Parnaz Foroutan is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Girl from the Garden (Ecco 2015) which received the PEN Emerging Voices Award and was named one of Booklist’s “Top 10 First Novels” of 2015. Her memoir Home is a Stranger (Chicago Review Press 2020) is about her journey back to Iran as a young woman, two decades after her family fled the rise of the Islamic Theocracy. Her essays have appeared on NBC Think, The Sun and other literary journals. The essay that made her mother proudest, entitled "America" and addressing the refugee crisis, appears in the anthology Radical Hope (Vintage 2017).