A kid from southern California, college at U.C. Berkeley and University of Chicago. Have taught at Emory University and University of Chicago - Persian literature, Iranian cinema, Islamic civilization of the medieval period, Translation History of the literatures of the Middle East, etc.
My publications include translations of modern stories and poems by various Iranian authors, including the book In a Voice of Their Own: A Collection of Stories by Iranian Women written since the Revolution of 1979, with Farzin Yazdanfar (Mazda Publishers, 1996), as well as translations in several other collections, articles about classical Persian literature and sufism appearing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Encyclopedia of the Modern Muslim World, Encyclopedia of the Qur'ān, and the Encyclopedia of Religion. With Heshmat Moayyad, I worked on the translation and annotation of a hagiographical account of a popular Sufi saint of 12th century Khorasan, The Colossal Elephant and His Spiritual Feats: Shaykh Ahmad-e Jām (Mazda, 2004). Together with Sunil Sharma, I edited The Necklace of the Pleiades: Studies in Persian Literature and Culture (Rozenberg / Purdue University Press, 2007).
My study, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld) received the British-Kuwaiti Friendship award (BRSMES) for the best book published in the United Kingdom in the field of Middle Eastern Studies in 2000 (translations have been published in Iran, Turkey and Denmark). An updated edition was published in 2007 to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the poet's birth, along with a collection of literary translations of Rumi's poetry, Rumi: Swallowing the Sun (Oneworld, 2007).
