A Reading by Sholeh Wolpe

Award-winning Iran-born poet Sholeh Wolpe reads below from her most recently published collection Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths (The University of Arkansas Press, 2013). The reading was performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to music by Hamid Saeidi. Wolpe's seven-movement poem uses "the seven tokens Iranians put on their table in anticipation and final celebration of each new year" (read about the Persian New Year); it is "a metaphor for [Wolpe's] own journey away from her country, and the futility of searching for home".

Wolpe's other collections are Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen Press, 2008) and The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press, 2004). Wolpe also is the editor of Breaking the Jaws of Silence: Sixty American Poets Speak to the World (The University of Arkansas Press, 2013) and The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles (Michigan State University Press, 2012). She has translated poems (Sin of 2010) by the late Persian poet and film director Forough Ferrokhzad  (1935-1967) and, with Iranian poet and translator Mohsen Emadi, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. She is included in the anthology Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (The University of Arkansas Press, 2006).

Wolpe lives in Los Angeles, California.

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Sholeh Wolpe at Michigan State University Press, The Poetry Foundation, Poets & Writers , Red Hen Press, Terrain, The University of Arkansas Press, Words with Writers